Advices to PhD students

The following two pages from famous professors in computer networking are provided for your reference. All in all, you should mainly depend on yourself in your PhD journey. To complete your PhD, you need to discover, implement, evaluate, and write up your own ideas.

• Prof. S. Keshav has a comprehensive webpage of advice to PhD students, which is very interesting and helpful.
• Prof. James Kurose has a webpage which lists his talks on writing and research.

Scholarships for PhD students at our university

Please refer to WSU postgraduate scholarships for details. Especially, please read the 'Guidelines for ranking HDR scholarships' page, which details our uni's criteria of ranking applicants in deciding the scholarship recipients. Please prepare your application materials according to it, and try to score the most points possible.

Some quotes that may help during your PhD journey

1. The Double-Sided Values of Science

Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad - but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.   ...   Science is the key to the Heaven, but also the key to the Hell.

     ---- By Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988), Physicist, Nobel Laueate.

2. The Mundanity of Excellence

Excellence is mundane. Excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time.

     ---- By Daniel Chambliss, Sociological Researcher.

This idea is also elaborated in the following web article: Deliberate Practice: How to Pursue Excellence.

3. Boredom is a major source of creativity

This is the conclusion of some recent studies. For details, please refer to How Being Bored Out of Your Mind Makes You More Creative.

     ---- By Clive Thompson, Author for Wired magazine.

4. For success, age is just a meaningless number. The bottom line is: never give up. When you give up, that's when your creativity ends.

This is the conclusion of a study led by network scientist Albert Barabasi published at Science. For details, please refer to this NY Times article.

     ---- By Albert Barabasi, Network Scientist at Northeastern University, USA.