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How to Spend Your Senior Year: A Letter to the Students Who Are Guaranteed Admission to Graduate School
Dear all,
Congratulations耘眨！ It's time to get yourself a glass of champagne and celebrate today's victory. Next year you will be a graduate student, which means you are coming to the end of your undergraduate studies. How can you make the transition from undergraduate to graduate school in less than a year? As a Ph.D. student, I was confused by this question as well at that period. Today, I will give you some advice that I hope will help you.
Step 1 Contact With Your Advisor As Soon As Possible
You can browse the official website of your graduate school and get the potential advisors’ email addresses or cell phone numbers or anything else that can help you communicate with them. Then, be sure to prepare a cover letter to illustrate your motivation for researching under his/her supervision in your graduate studies. In addition to your cover letter, a well-prepared resume is encouraged, including your transcripts, research experience, and interests. Please be aware that the advisor is crucial to you throughout your graduate studies, so be sure to choose the right one for you. How to choose one proper advisor? First, read his/her CV, which you can download from his/her homepage, and then check whether his/her research areas match your interests. The best methodology to find out the academic ability of your potential advisor is to use Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com.hk/?hl=zh-CN) or ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net/**) **to search his/her recent works. Of course, consulting your advisor’s current students is the most effective way.
**Step 2 **Learn and Reinforce Some Basic Research Skills
Do you know how to do the literature review? Can you use the required applications to do the data analysis? Have you ever used LaTex as your typesetting tool? I can list more than ten questions like these. What I want to express is, for most of you who haven’t done any research in the past three years, please prepare yourself for the basic skills because you won’t have too much time to learn them from the very beginning when you enter your graduate school. They are extremely essential to your future work. There are plenty of learning resources available on the website; you can find and use them easily and free of charge. Now I will list some basic skills which you may need.
Data analysis. You know not only the basic operations of software you should be familiar with but also the algorithms. For example, all of us know how to manipulate linear regression (LR) to predict or classify, but few of us know the principles behind it. We can use many tools to do LR, such as SPSS, MATLAB, and even Excel. So remember, do not just learn the basic or even complicated operations of the data analysis tools, but study their algorithms as well. As a student who majors in business or science-related subjects, you should know more about programming languages due to they are more convenient and customized when you are dealing with big data.
Literature review. One preliminary of your research is to collect the related literature and analyze them to find state-of-the-art ideas to solidify your work. So you have to know how to find and arrange the literature. There are many paid resources you can use, such as IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, etc. But usually, they are extremely expensive, so I highly recommend you to use SCI-HUB (https://tool.yovisun.com/scihub/), which is the most powerful and convenient open resources website for academic. You can find almost 99% of the published papers you want easily and, of course, totally for free! My experience is to use Google Scholar to search for the link of the paper and then download or read the paper from SCI-HUB. As for how to arrange the literature, I will recommend EndNote or Mendeley; those two applications are friendly to beginners and can save much of your time.
Ability in English reading and writing. Most of you are excellent in English and have very high scores in CET-4/6, but that’s not enough. Conducting research requires you to read and even write papers totally in English. It’s not the same as finishing a short composition but needs you to express your idea logically in a large scale of sentences. And you should know that most of the state-of-the-art papers are written in English. So for all of us, no matter whether you are at home or abroad, please try your best to improve your English ability. As far as I know, some domestic teams used to ask their team members to do the presentation in English. How to learn English at our age? One paper a day will be helpful, I think. Imitation is always a good choice for beginners. And when you are writing a paper, you can use Grammarly ( https://app.grammarly.com/docs/new) as the tool to check the grammar.
Typography. If you have done the undergraduate thesis, you will find how important the typography of your paper. Most of my friends used Word as a typesetting tool. I don’t mean that Word is useless, but it’s not effective to help you conduct research. There are too many buttons on it, and usually, you can’t remember how to use them. What’s the most important thing is there always exist some problems you can’t solve when you use Word. I’m sure you must be disappointed about Word sometimes, am I right? So why not try LaTex, and enjoy the freedom? I don’t want to say too much about its benefits or operations, so I will give some tutorial links to you as follows.
https://liam.page/2014/09/08/latex-introduction/ A very good brief introduction to LaTex.
https://www.overleaf.com/ A very excellent online LaTex application, you can also use it to share the latest proceedings of your work with your team.
Step 3 Develop the Systematically Understanding of Your Research Area
If you want to learn your research area before your enrollment, you should do it in your senior year. I will always suggest you ask your advisor for a paper list related to your future work. By doing that, you can have the most accurate guidance of your area, and you won’t be lost in the large literature dataset. Remember, read the papers which are published in the top journals or conferences. Usually, a survey paper at the beginning will help you to see the big picture of that area. And then find more papers that are mentioned in the survey paper. If you are confident enough, why don’t you try to write a survey paper by yourself? I always remember a very famous professor once said, “Survey papers, if well written, can attract a lot of citations and the attention of the community. It will also help you build good foundations on the subject before doing the actual development. This will require building a good bibliography of related papers, categorizing them in terms of their contribution, and identifying research challenges and opportunities for future progress.”. So have a try. In the following academic year, more paper reading will be helpful.
**Step 4 **Finish Your Undergraduate Thesis by the End of the Spring Festival
I know that DDL will always be the most productive motivation for most of us, but I suggest you finish your thesis as early as possible. To be honest, the graduate thesis is very easy, and almost all the students can do it. The reason that finishing it early is to save more time to do other things, and the graduate thesis is nothing big deal, so it’s not worth too much time to do it. In my experience, when we are in the second semester, we will lose control of time because there are no courses, and they are always hard to get connections with the undergraduate tutor. So be sure to finish your thesis in a short period, and then you will have more time to do other things. You can have a nice graduation trip, or you can fall in love with someone to enjoy the beauty of love. Though the thesis is not so important, treat it seriously as well.
Oh, God, I’ve written so much. I hope you can enjoy a wonderful senior year.
Best Regards,
Jerry
