Developing Your Own Constructs and Other Advice from Western's Survival Skills for Graduate Students

Western has a site called Survival Skills for Graduate Students, directed
primarily at neuroscience grad students:

http://www.physpharm.fmd.uwo.ca/undergrad/survivalwebv3/frame.htm

Some of the advice is routine and useless, but some is solid and novel,
for instance about how to decide whether you want a particular job, and
how to make slides. There's an interesting discussion of how to make
timelines, which I'm not sure I agree with, and at least one thing that no
one ever told me but I wish they had, about how your real job as a
scientist is developing constructs:

http://www.physpharm.fmd.uwo.ca/undergrad/survivalwebv3/s4_skill/constr.html

"As a scientist you need to develop constructs, in your mind, for how you
think things work. ... Now you have been given your own Lego construction
set and you have to learn how to build something. This requires *reading
less* and *thinking more*." Key ways it helps: To keep from reading too
much, to keep from doing too many experiments.

Yes, this is exactly how I will think of my work from now on.

Some other pieces of advice that struck me as surprising enough to note:

*Go to the graduate club. Being a scientist is being a part of a culture.
You will be surprised what you can learn about the brain, playing pool
with an anthropologist.
* Make sure to leave some unscheduled time in your regular working time.
Sit back and let your mind wander. You will find that this is your most
important time.
* Doing a literature search Do not start with a computer search (eg
Med-Line). Then they say how you should do it:

http://www.physpharm.fmd.uwo.ca/undergrad/survivalwebv3/s4_skill/Search.html