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Cal Newport is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He previously earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2009, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2004.
Newport is the author of three books of unconventional advice for students, which have sold a combined total of more than 100,000 copies: How to Be a High School Superstar (Random House, 2010), How to Become a Straight-A Student (Random House, 2006), and How to Win at College (Random House, 2005). His fourth book, a contrarian look at career advice, will be published by Grand Central in September, 2012.
In his role as a student success expert, Newport has appeared on ABC, NBC, and CBS and on over 50 radio networks, including ABC Radio, USA Radio, and XM Satellite Radio. His advice has also been featured in major publications and on some of the Internet's most popular sites. His Study Hacks blog, which offers advice to both students and graduates, attracts over 100,000 unique visitors a month.
From: http://calnewport.com/info/
CV: http://cs.georgetown.edu/~cnewport/pubs/CalvinNewportCV.pdf
I’m a graduate student. A fourth year PhD candidate at MIT, to be precise. And I have an annoying habit. Whenever I get a chance to collaborate, chat, or hang around with successful professors in my field, I like to find out about their work habits. In doing so, I’ve discovered the following two trends:
Graduate students exist in an interesting middle ground between these two extremes. We don’t have the administrative burden of a young professor. On the other hand, unlike older, distinguished professors, we can’t get away with mainly just thinking big thoughts. They can do this because their young grad student collaborators — i.e., us — will take care of the time-consuming grunt work on actually writing papers.Keeping these two examples in mind, however, I devised an innovative schedule for my graduate student work week. I’ve used it for over a year now, and have been really pleased with its results. It works as follows:
The 3 + 2 Graduate Student Work WeekDesignate one day each week to be your Administrative Nonsense DaySpend this entire day taking care of any work on your plate that doesn’t directly connect to the task of conducting research and writing research papers. This is when I fill out forms, return library books, hand in reimbursement paperwork, call the cable guy, and add new publications to my web site. You get the idea…
Designate one day each week to be your Big Idea DaySpend this entire day doing literature search and brainstorming on that research project you’ve always day-dreamed about, but have been to afraid to mention to your advisor. If you don’t set aside this time, you will get stuck in the rut of happenstance papers — the projects you fall into out of convenience or advisorial coercion. This work is fine. It’s how you earn your research stripes. But some time along the way you have to be fighting to make your own mark.
Use the Other Three Days to Get Your Normal Work DoneMost of what we do as graduate students is working on various stages of the paper-writing process. This spans cleaning up numbers in Excel to editing the related work section of a journal submission. Use these three days to get this work done. Because you isolated the administrative nonsense on another day, you might be surprised by how much gets accomplished in just 60% of the week. I like to make my Admin Day on Monday and my Big Idea Day on Friday, so this work can happen consecutively in the middle of the week; but preferences differ here.That’s it. A simple structure. But sometimes it’s the simplest changes that yield the most consistent results over time. This approach, of course, gets complicated by classes, group meetings, and collaborators who don’t know about (or, frankly care) that a certain day is your big idea day. So it will never apply perfectly. But even the attempt can make a difference…
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