It is tempting for researchers — including PhD students — to compare their individual progress and journey with the progress and journey of others. I encourage PhD students to try to avoid making such comparisons. In this post, I explain why. I do so using the “Research Iceberg Analogy”. I’ve…

This is a “sidebar” to my “Unseen PhD Effort, ‘Failures,’ and the Research Iceberg Analogy” post; I’ll refer to the other post as my main post. In my main post, I include the figure below and I remark that research is an iterative process with many “failures” along the way…

When one does a PhD — or any research for that matter — there is an enormous amount of unseen effort. The enormity of the unseen effort can be discouraging, especially while in the middle of a project. This unseen effort can include countless hours of thinking, research instrument development…

I recently had a conversation about the now-classic “PhD Bubble Diagram” with UW Allen School Security Lab member Miranda Wei. I like certain aspects of the diagram and dislike others. When asked to explain what I disliked about the diagram, I ended up drawing my own: The size of a…