---

---

12/27/2021

Most of what I learned during my PhD had nothing to do with my dissertation topic, grad school, or even computer science.

These lessons are so ingrained into me now that I’m shocked when I find out that not everyone knows them! I think they can be applied to virtually any office job.

I’ve written down a few of the lessons in hopes that my students find them useful:

• Lead or be led
• Topic sentences
• Get excited
• Unmotivated details
• Slides versus speaker
• Managers as input/output machines
• Daily progress tracking

Thank you to everyone that taught me these, especially my PhD advisor, Scott Fleming.

---

Lead or be led

Before I went off to my first research internship, my PhD advisor imparted some valuable wisdom with me: “lead or be led”.

Sure, it sounds like a useless platitude. At the time, my advisor meant it as a way to keep me focused on getting what I want out of the internship. He just wanted me to be strategic about my time. But the mantra continues to come up again and again in my career.

If you show up to a meeting/internship/job expecting to be told what to do, then chances are someone will tell you something to do. It might not be the best thing for you to be doing though.

Alternatively, if you show up to a meeting/internship/job with a convincing game plan, then chances are people will get out of your way so you can go do it. Sometimes they will even surprise you with the ways they can support you with it.

Don’t expect people in these situations to ask you what you want to work on. You should already be telling them.

You won’t always win though. There is a lot of strategy to how you go about this. But first, show up with a plan.

Topic sentences

This is the #1 tangible skill that I learned from graduate school. It makes writing so much easier.

After coming up with a rough outline for whatever you need to write, the next step is to write the topic sentences.

Seriously.

Write the first sentence of every paragraph you intend on having. Keep them simple for now. You can improve the prose later. That is it. Don’t write the paragraph bodies yet!

Now read the topic sentences.

Do those sentences convey what you wanted? Do they flow together? Are you missing any major details? I often have to iterate on these a few times.

Keep these topic sentences around. In fact, I was taught to bold them. My PhD advisor used a LaTeX macro so they can be turned on and off.

Whenever you or a collaborator needs to skim the writing, they just need to read these bolded topic sentences to understand the st