What are some practical work suggestions for philosophy PhD students who are seeking academic careers?
You can check it out here.
Below are some of the things on his list:
- Use a reference manager.
- Use a password manager.
- Keep templates for types of emails you’ll send a lot.
- Keep notes on pretty much everything. It’s easy to write something down, especially on a computer. If you’ve written it down, the worst that can happen is that you never look at it again. But if you don’t write it down the worst that can happen is that you want to look at it again, and can’t.
- Buy a second laptop charger and leave it at campus, so that you don’t have to lug it to work and back every day.
- Whenever you distribute your papers/chapters/writing, use PDF.
- Ensure your computer has a proper PDF reader.
- Learn to touch type.
- Learn how Outlook works.
- Back up your data regularly (either through a cloud service or external drives).
- Have a website.
- Get a passport.
- Buy a good suitcase.
- See if your university offers travel insurance.
There’s much more at Mr. Heagren’s page for the guide.
Check it out, and if you have additions, suggestions, or comments, let us know.
Some of these are ok. Some are just genuinely terrible advice.
However, the list is helpful for grad students in that it lets them perform the following exercise:
Go through this list.
For each item ask yourself “does this say ‘don’t have fun’?”.
Make a separate list containing every item that tells you not to have fun.
Regularly (like, at least a few times a month, but preferably a bit more than that) break one or two of those rules.
Now look through list and for each item ask yourself “does this say ‘be fancy af’?”. For those that do say that, laugh at them and imagine yourself making fun of people who believe them.
Refuse to hang out or be around people who voice such rules or judge you for failing to follow rules like the ones on the new lists you’ve made. Revisit them periodically and laugh about people believing you have to follow these rules and maybe feel sorry for the people who spend grad school being sad while following these rules.
Actual advice: be a normal human person while you’re in graduate school. You’re not a monk. (Unless you are, but then you’re probably not reading this so whatevs.) And none of what you’re doing matters so much that you need to take it this seriously. It’s ok to not use page numbers. It’s ok if your notes are a mess. It’s ok to choose a publication venue on a whim. It’s ok to not spend serious time researching savings accounts or fucking office chairs or whatever. It’s ok to skip a gym day. It’s ok if you never ever read a single philosophy blog again. And if you start to feel like it really matters in a deep way that you do any of these things, go find a therapist and tell them you need help putting things in perspective. Actually do that right away regardless. Like seriously, go do it right now.
And then relax, don’t worry, and enjoy graduate school. It should be fun.
> It’s ok to not use page numbers
I was nodding sympathetically right up to this point.
I’m not convinced. If a Ph.D. student doesn’t manage to land a job in philosophy, that’s likely to be a huge problem. If you go into a program at all, it’s probably best to work your guts out.
A lot of these are tips about how to make it more fun! Things like getting a good seating posture and a good monitor help avoid making work miserable, and things like having friends outside the department, getting exercise, and talking to people with somewhat more distant interests about your work will actively help your mood and your enjoyment.
“It’s ok to not use page numbers. It’s ok if your notes are a mess. It’s ok to choose a publication venue on a whim. It’s ok to not spend serious time researching savings accounts or fucking office chairs or whatever. It’s ok to skip a gym day. It’s ok if you never ever read a single philosophy blog again.”
It’s totally ok to not follow the advice like they are the categorical imperatives, but here’s some stuff I think should be put into perspective.
Remember that the job market and the living costs are very different from the situation 10 years ago. Some people struggle, and it’s at least permissible to not be condescending towards those who are not financially extremely well-off.
My friend I got my first permanent job in 2019 and grew up in a single-wide in rural Montana. I’m still pretty sure it’s ok to have fun, drink beer, eat french fries, and to occasionally go get a massage or a pedicure or a nice haircut while you’re in graduate school. I’m also pretty sure that anyone who says otherwise is full of it.
(In case it’s not clear, I took those to all be items ruled out by the advice in the post I responded to.)
No one is being moralistic about this. It’s about instrumental rationality. Work harder than the the other person who’ll be applying for the same jobs.
And anyone who says “I did X and I got a job” is just not a serious reasoner about this. The only claim that fact negates is the claim “it is impossible for anyone to X and get a job.” No one endorses such a claim. The claim is: one’s chances of succeeding improves the more you Y and the less you X.
What a helpful list! One thing I would add to the advice about note-taking (and this may be a slight disagreement with Heagren’s second footnote): I strongly recommend using a system, such as a note-taking software, that allows you to tag individual notes with keywords and to filter search results by keyword. Toward the end of a dissertation or book project, one will have so many notes that a simple text-search will not always be sufficient, leading to lots of frustration and wasted time. One concept or idea can be referred to with many different words or phrases, so it’s easy to miss relevant notes in a text search. Plus, some words have several different meanings, which can result in very large numbers of completely irrelevant search results–especially since many technical terms in philosophy are words that also have non-technical meanings and are used very frequently in these other senses. And most text search functions won’t be very helpful when you’re looking for notes about the relation between two or more concepts, or for one specific philosopher’s views on a specific concept. In my experience, putting some thought into how one will later find relevant notes will definitely pay off.
Yes, but … the crucial thing (for me) is *first making the note*. Doing so with absolute ease: anytime, anywhere, online or offline – on any phone or laptop, whether Android or iOS, Linux, Windows, or Apple; on walk, bus, train, or plane; typed in cellular desert or dictated in wet shower or dark bedroom – with absolutely no impediments of time or cost of any sort that might risk *not* making a note.
For me, the multi-platform, open source LogSeq checks all the boxes. For later organization *after* inspiration, linking notes in a graph database (a personal wiki) is far more maintainable and extendible than tagging or folders
LogSeq looks good–that’s exactly the kind of software I was referring to, and it allows tagging. And I totally agree that sometimes it’s easiest to first create a note in some other format and then later organize them; I often take my initial notes on paper while reading books or articles, for instance. But it is important to organize them at some point.
I suggest Hypernomicon.
Great tips on the list! One general set of things I’d add, is ergonomic equipment. The most important (but also most expensive) is a relatively good mattress and a relatively good computer chair (if one expects to work enough from home). I have met SO MANY academics with back problems. Important also to use a computer screen (very cheap if used) adjusted to height level (I use books for props). This is less common, but enough people I know developed carpal-tunnel, that I’d also recommend an ergonomic keyboard and mouse (roughly $100 for both). All these are huge expenses on most grad student budget, but worth they money, and it pays to buy them early.
Relatedly, find ways to stay active, even at points in the semester when it feels like you only have time to write. Indeed, exercise breaks are probably be beneficial to your writing.
Last, I recommend going to at least a few of the general student orientations, and trying to meet people outside your department (and if you can outside the university). I found it so helpful to have friends I could hang out with, where it wasn’t even a remote possibility that we would talk shop (as much as I like to do that!)
Also, read “Good Work If You Can Get It” ! Great Primer for Job Market/Grad School Success and Expectations!
Develop a “shift-work” schedule that divides your day into blocks. Maybe do the writing first, but at a certain hour you must shift to class prep — for me, writing would quickly eat up all my time and leave me unprepared. Try to use any workspace outside your home (e.g., a library carrel). Minimize potential distractions in that workspace.
and Roth IRA! I just recently discovered it and regret I didn’t do it earlier
Gotta say, these posts and comments are always entertaining in a twisted way but, my god, half of it is “figured out am supposed to face reality and here’s what I came up with or what others told me”. Like “get a passport”, “learn to cook”, “save, **if you can**”, is this trolling??
Here’s why I don’t think it’s trolling. There are some, possibly like me, who moved out of home, to a different country that speaks a completely different language, who has 0 financial literacy locally, and who has received their first pay in their lives in the form of scholarship, and thus have some financial freedom (despite highly limited) but have no idea whatsoever how to plan for the future. Knowing how to live a life and be a responsible person needs learning. Not everyone’s parents have taught these important lessons to their offspring, most likely, because like my parents, have no idea whatsoever how to live a responsible life in another country.
I really wish I knew more about how to save and invest as a grad student. I also know friends who suffer from work injuries. I also wish I had more discipline to live a healthier life style when I was a grad student. So no, sharing one’s experience and things I wish I knew when I started PhD doesn’t feel like trolling, at least to me.
Yep, having done all the moving to a different country, etc. yet also having had to work for pay before that (so first pay way before scholarship): yes, this is advice about how to lead an independent life; away from caregivers, if any, etc. Which, sure, most people have to learn at some point. That it gets subsumed under “career advice for philosophy PhD students” is what makes it aound like trolling.
Why is it trolling? I think philosophy in particular is often full of explicitly stating the things you thought everyone knew, but often realize that a substantial fraction of people have never thought about.
If you mean that this kind of advice makes explicit the assumption that philosophy PhDs are people who have just left their caregivers, seemingly having never had to learn to cook, or to think about financial matters, and so on — sure.
That is true. But it is also true that philosophers will sometimes state what everyone already knew as if it were groundbreaking.
Just one other: apply for credit cards that give good rewards for no annual fee. The no-brainers are:
Could also get some travel rewards cards, or Amazon’s, which gives 5% back. But these savings really add up when you’re a grad student.
Lots of great advice there! But I suspect that many grad students who are tempted to learn LaTeX would be better off using John MacFarlane’s (much simpler) Pandoc instead.
(I describe my setup here.)
I would strike some from the list:
For a PDF Reader, I like PDF-XChange Viewer, which you can no longer officially download. If you trust a third party site (you typically shouldn’t…) you can still get it here and other places.
For note taking software I like Hypernomicon.
For writing, you might be interested in checking out Scrivener. I’ve found it extremely helpful for many reasons, most notably keeping all my writing in one place, so I can see all the articles I’m working on at a glance.
I would suggest getting two monitors (or one monitor to hook up to your laptop). I like my second monitor to be a widescreen monitor (they all are these days) turned sideways so I can read articles on it and see the entire page at once.
Try to figure out whether you can find a way to get by without drinking caffeine every day. If you can, then you can save the caffeine for when you really need it. (I find caffeine helps me focus, but I’ve read that this may not be a universal effect. If all it does is help you stay awake, then I guess there’s less of a downside to being addicted and so maybe only people with a physiology/psychology similar to mine should consider this advice.)
There are two main reasons to use LaTeX:
1) It has no real rival for efficiently typesetting large amounts of complicated mathematics and mathematical diagrams.
2) It forces a certain logical order on your document’s typesetting, in that it requires you to think in terms of sectioning, logical markup etc., whereas in MS Word these things are optional.
If your writing involves large amounts of complicated mathematics, you almost certainly need to learn LaTeX. In philosophy, this includes large parts (though by no means all) of philosophy of physics, much of mathematical logic, and possibly a few very technical areas of MLE (I have interventionist theories of causation in mind).
The vast majority of philosophy does not require large amounts of complicated mathematics. If this describes you, probably don’t learn LaTeX. Probably you should just use MS Word (though it is worth taking a little time to actually learn how its document-structuring features work, rather than just manually using boldface and spacing). If you really want something more logically than visually oriented, there are better markup options available (LaTeX has relatively deep design issues as a markup language).
The other advantage of Word is that as I understand it, outside some technical areas it’s mostly what journals will use, which cuts down on issues at the copyediting/typesetting stage.
(If you use occasional bits of mathematics, you can probably coax MSWord into doing it for you. But don’t get derailed from the writing process. If some equation-typesetting (or diagram-drawing, etc.) task is going to take you a nontrivial amount of time, just write the equation in longhand on a sheet of paper (or draw it on a tablet), number it, and reference the number in your manuscript. There will be time to lovingly typeset the equation or draw a beautiful diagram once you’re actually done writing.)
To write math in Word, you simply go to Insert > Equation > LaTeX and type it as you would in LaTeX
A fair point, but by the time you know enough LaTeX to format equations, I’m not sure you wouldn’t be better off just using it direct.
I think it’s easy to learn the syntax for making equations, without the esoteric typography of LaTeX like loading extra packages just to change line spacing, insert proper fonts, fix justification, etc, having to escape everyday characters like % and _, remember – vs — vs — for dashes, hand-tune spacing around headings and captions, parindent parskip newline bigspace etc etc plus it’s so hard to just move text around and you have to recompile constantly to see what you’re writing actually looks on the document…
If you are typesetting large amounts of complicated mathematics, you will have to learn most of this, and you will have to recompile constantly to see what you are typesetting, whether or not it’s embedded in another program.
If you are not doing so – if you’re just doing a couple of calculations in Bayes’ theorem or something else typographically elementary – then sure, don’t bother. (That was the point of my original post.)
As a point of interest, I’ve just experimented briefly with MS Word’s embedded LaTeX and it is extremely awkward and not fully reliable even for a comparatively simple expression (I tried a double integral and a continued fraction). I don’t know anyone in theoretical physics proper who typesets math that way and it’s obvious why that is.
“It has no real rival for efficiently typesetting large amounts of complicated mathematics and mathematical diagrams”.
I think this depends on what you mean by a rival. (And how you feel about Typst.) Lots of versions of markdown do fine with very complicated math.
To be fair, markdown works so well because it serves as a frontend to LaTeX (or Typst). And the math code in most forms of markdown just is the LaTeX code. So it’s borderline between a rival and a variant.
But I’d still say for most people who do moderate amounts of mathematical writing it’s better than writing directly into LaTeX. (As Richard Chappell says, most grad students are probably better off learning pandoc-flavored markdown, or something like Quarto that essentially uses pandoc.) That’s partially because it’s easier to use, and partially because it makes it easier to convert documents into Word, or HTML, or EPub, or whatever is most useful.
Are we really disagreeing? If you do “moderate amounts of mathematical writing”, probably LaTeX isn’t worth it. If you do “large amounts of complicated mathematics”, probably it is. (Most philosophers do at most “moderate amounts of mathematical writing”, but a fair fraction of philosophers of physics do “large amounts of complicated mathematics.”)
I do agree that being able to access LaTeX equation typesetting inside something else blurs the boundaries. And I don’t have any particular brief for LaTeX as a typesetting language outside how it handles equations. (I do use it, even for math-light work, because I am so used to it, but a lot of the point of my original comment was that most people would be advised to get used to something else.)
“Are we really disagreeing?” Probably not a lot!
If we are disagreeing, it’s that I think people who only do moderate amounts of math, and even people who don’t do any math, would be better learning some plain text format for writing papers in. But that’s maybe orthogonal to the main topic of this thread.
You mean: as opposed to Word? I could believe it; I don’t have a lot of experience, since LaTeX is essential for my own work. (When I do non-research work – e.g. writing policy papers in service work – I tend to use Word, but those documents aren’t usually very complicated, and also I know how to use Word in a somewhat more logical, less visual fashion.)
In the spirit of Shay Logan’s comment above, I’ll just say that people should just drink however much coffee they need or want or feel like drinking and no one should ever tell them otherwise unless it uncontroversially impairs their functioning. If grad school requires cutting down on caffeine then it’s not worth it. Damn, if life requires it then it might not be worth living.
For many people, how much caffeine they need is partially a function of how much caffeine they drink, and how much caffeine they want is partially a function of their attitudes, which are alterable on the basis of reflection. One useful input into reflection can be hearing about the experiences of other people in similar situations. If you are someone who would rather die than drink less caffeine, you are probably not in the target audience for caffeine-related advice. But not everyone is like you in this respect. I’m not, for instance.
(sadly) age matters, too. When I was younger (including when I was in grad school) I could drink coffee all day and still generally sleep well. That’s not the case anymore. In this way it’s a bit like drinking alcohol. This may happen differently for different people.
“Levinas himself describes these cold sweats in Existence and Existents, these moments of insomnia; but … if you habitually drink too much coffee in the day and in the night wake in a state of dreadful philosophical perplexity, then the first thing to ask yourself is not ‘what is wrong with the universe?’ but ‘shouldn’t I lower my caffeine intake?’” (Will Buckingham, “Three Cups: The Anatomy of a Wasted Afternoon,” in Coffee: Grounds for Debate, ed. S. F. Parker and M. W. Austin [Wiley, 2011])
“One useful input into reflection can be hearing about the experiences of other people in similar situations.”
I provided my input which is that coffee makes life worth living. You provided yours, and you seem to assume that ideally one should drink *less* (maybe I’m misreading you). I strongly disagree with this kind of perfectionism. None of us should frame those inputs as *advice* about how to do grad school, much less how to live. “Try to figure out whether you can find a way to get by without drinking caffeine every day” is not helpful unless you know who you’re talking to. (As an exercise try to substitute other practices for coffee and see how it sounds—sex, weed, afterwork beers, and many other things which can be addictive.)
But, most importantly, I thought it was obvious my comment was intentionally over the top. People should drink less coffee to make it less expensive for me.
You’re misreading me, yes. I think people should drink however much works for them. I also think that people should figure out whether less than what they’re currently drinking works for them. (I also think they should figure out whether drinking more than what they’re currently drinking works for them, but I’ve also never met an academic who hasn’t tried out “drink more caffeine,” so I didn’t bother giving that advice.)
“I also think that people should figure out whether less than what they’re currently drinking works for them.”
I still don’t understand why but I’m glad we agree that people should do what they want.
One reason why people might want to see if drinking less coffee works well or better for them is that it might be imparing their sleep, or making them edgy, or giving them digestive issues, possibly without their knowing it, or with their knowing it, but fearing that those are just the trade-offs they need to make, when they might well be better off with less coffee. That won’t be everyone, of course, but those certainly seem like reasons people might consider.
Sure. But then we’d need to know they have those issues before offering unsolicited advice on how to live their lives. Plus, we’re really stretching the scope of grad school advice. Grad students should also eat more veggies, drink less, avoid drugs, put sunscreen on, and floss.
I don’t know if posting advice in a thread titled “Practical Tips for Philosophy PhD Students” where the post ends with “if you have additions, suggestions, or comments, let us know” counts as “unsolicited advice.” If that does not count as solicitation then I am not sure what would count.
You’re still missing the point: your advice was initially framed as a *general recommendation* (if not an imperative). And my point has from the start been that unless you know (or there’s good reason to suspect) someone’s drinking too much coffee for their own good, telling them they should experiment is inappropriate. Instead you could say: “if you’re struggling with x, y, z, you might want to try cutting down on coffee.” But do we know that a lot of grad students struggle with x, y, z? You hedged at the end of your advice, so maybe this should just have been foregrounded. I’m just saying a lot of people are not like you and are not interested in experimenting. For them, “Try…” is unsolicited advice.
If people know they’re not like me, then I can understand being not interested in experimenting. (This is presumably because they have experimented in the past.) But if they do not know whether they are like me or not, why ought they to be against experimenting to find out if they are like me? I did not know I was like me until I experimented. Hence the advice.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it?
Reminding you again that my first comment was clearly over-the-top, I’ll say one last thing: if a stranger told me to try to drink less coffee unprompted I’d call the cops.
I’ve enjoyed using Obsidian for note-taking, and integrating that with Zotero. Some swear by using some variety of Neovim with a wiki plugin, but that’s just rawdogging it at that point.
Outlook has always seemed *surprisingly* bad to me, especially the search function. Thunderbird is much better.
On experimenting with coffee intake, here’s Michael Pollan’s account of what it’s like to quit for 3 months:
Following up just one of the ideas: Here’s a handout I wrote for students on taking notes on philosophical texts.
https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/eaeecef8-a4e2-4708-9403-161d1243d03a/content
1) Have many non-philosopher friends. Even better: have many non-academic friends.
Why? Because it is easy to think philosophy is the whole world. It is not.
How? Have non-campus based hobbies. Social dances, hiking, attending tridentine masses, you tell me.
2) Do not date other academics. Your ideal romantic partner is a high IQ type who can follow you around the world while you do your postdocs and research stays (NGO manager, coder, free lancer)…
Why? Same as above.
How? Same as above.
If you must date academics, only date someone with significantly better career prospects than you and who will get you a spousal hire. Unlikely to happen though, since assortative mating is even more a thing in academia than anywhere else.
“If you must date academics, only date someone with significantly better career prospects than you and who will get you a spousal hire. Unlikely to happen though, since assortative mating is even more a thing in academia than everywhere else.”
Also unlikely to happen since it’s logically impossible for both you and your date to follow this advice.
3) Remember that any advice you read (for instance the one above) will only give you a competitive edge if very few others follow it.
Corollary: do not publish your *best* secrets for success as a graduate student on philosophy blogs.
(Or, I suppose: if you must date academics, date only those who don’t read philosophy blogs.)
That is indeed why I waited until after I got a job old chap
Which is why they would have better career prospects since they are too busy writting papers.
See, it all makes sense.
Terrible advice. I recommend the opposite. Make friends with fellow academics, learn from them. Date other graduate students, preferably in philosophy. Fall in love with one over your intense, stimulating conversations, marry him/her, have a bunch of kids.
There will never be an better time to meet a lot of intelligent, successful, beautiful people with common interests in a similar life situation, and also there’s not a better time to have kids.
Well, hope you don’t mind living 7 years on distance when one of you get a postdoc in London and the other one a teaching fellowship in Seattle, and hope one of you is ok to abandon their career when it becomes obvious the university that hired one won’t hire the other.
Because this is how most academic couples end up. The scenario you described is fanciful unless both have degrees from Harvard.
This is nonsense. Also, if you are living on a different continent than your family, reevaluate your priorities. The high-flyers who live apart for prestigious, temporary jobs are not the norm. Most of us middling folks (without degrees from Harvard) make it work by moving around a bit until we find something that’s workable permanently.
In my experience, it works out okay for most people, eventually. I would never live apart from my kids, nor would my spouse. We’ve settled in a pretty good situation, as have many other people I’ve known in the same situation. We might have both done slightly better, career-wise, if we had focused our whole lives on our careers, eschewing marriage and children, but that would have been phenomenally stupid. Family life is, by miles and miles, more significant than my professional life.
I mean, you say philosophy is not the whole world but then give advice as if the only thing that should matter to you is your career–sacrificing your personal life for professional ambition is idiotic, loving and immersing yourself in philosophy is not. You will never have a better dating pool than the one you have in graduate school. If you can, find a lifelong partner there. Yes, maybe that might mean your career takes a slight hit, or maybe even you have to leave professional philosophy … But so what? That happens to a ton of people anyway. At least you won’t be 35, changing careers, and feeling adrift as you face middle-age alone. You’ll be 35 with a family whom you love, changing careers, feeling driven to support and provide a good life for your kids and spouse.
“This is nonsense”.
Stay polite please. I am just sharing my experience like everyone here. I think that private problems faced by academics are an under-discussed topic, so I am just flagging where some arbitrages might be done based on what I have seen.
“We’ve settled in a pretty good situation, as have many other people I’ve known in the same situation”.
Ever heard of survivorship bias?
“Loving and immersing yourself in philosophy is not”.
Never said you should not love and immerse yourself in philosophy.
“ You will never have a better dating pool than the one you have in graduate school”.
Not my experience at all. Quite the opposite, actually (I am a straight man FWIW). And I am not saying “don’t marry and have kids while in a grad school”, I am just saying, cultivate social and romantic circles outside of academia, that’s all. But if you find the love of your life on campus, then sure, wife her up.
I do not know where you are in your career and what is your life trajectory. But from what I have seen, what I have described above is indeed the norm among the late 20s and early 30s academics that I know, especially given that the time between the moment most people finish their PhD and secure a permanent job is getting longer and longer (I know people who have been on the market, and hence on long distance relationships, for a decade!). And none of them are high flyers at all (not being a high flyer myself I do not know many high flyers – did I mention assortative mating?).
Though I am happy things worked out for you of course!
Sorry if that came across as rude! Not my intention.
You are speaking in pretty absolute terms about what will happen to someone if they marry a philosopher … I just don’t think it’s true. Would be nice to have data on it, but I’ve known a lot of philosophy couples/academic couples from graduate school and they have, typically, landed well. Mid-career here. I’ve also known a lot of people who gave up on an academic career, but I don’t think that’s correlated at all with whether they married a philosopher.
We’re both speaking anecdotally, so I doubt we’ll get anywhere. But in any case, I don’t think it’s a career death sentence to marry another academic, and certainly if you find yourself in love with one, it’s a good idea to get married and prioritize a good relationship over an uncertain future profession. It’s also wonderful sharing your life with someone who shares your passions.
“But in any case, I don’t think it’s a career death sentence to marry another academic”
I never said that it was.
Yes, it is easy to think philosophy is the whole world when it is not. However, don’t you think that treating philosophy as the whole world is important for someone in grad school, unless they are so successful that they feel their future is assured? I know it’s not good for the mental health to live like that, but jobs are scarce.
I am unconvinced this actually improves people’s productivity and the quality of their work. (No doubt it depends on the person.)
You could be right. I have no hard evidence to the contrary. Does it not seem to you though that those professional philosophers who are most obsessive tend to publish most?
Not treating philosophy as if it were the whole world – for instance by not dating philosophers and cultivating non-academic social circles – also makes philosophy easier to leave.
Which statistically is something the majority of philosophy PhDs will have to do eventually.
i am wellllll past my phd and I can’t believe I have never thought of buying a laptop cable for my office haha, thanks all. I would love a more generic ‘life pro tips’ thread from DN users
Yes. And not least because I worry about leaving the damn thing in my office when I do bring it.
1. Cultivate a good file management system. Labelling files “Final final best 2” is terrible, and a recipe for getting lost or not knowing what to save. Personally, every time I open a document to make changes, no matter how small I save it under a new number (e.g. 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc.). When I’ve made truly major changes (e.g. massive deletions or reorganizing), or when I submit the paper somewhere, I change the main version numbers too (e.g. I shift from 1.35 to 2.0). This way, you always know at a glance which version is the most recent, you preserve a work history if you ever need it as evidence, you never lose material even when you go on a cutting spree, and, crucially, if a file gets corrupted or something you only lose a day’s work.
2.) Invest a couple hundred dollars in a spare laptop. It doesn’t have to be as good as your main one, just good enough that you can perform essential functions if or when your main computer is down for a while. You can also travel with the spare, so that it’s no big deal if it’s lost, damaged, or stolen.
3.) Spend a hundred dollars on a good external hard drive _with a high upload speed_ (MSI, for example, has a terrabyte drive with 20GB/s). The main obstacle to backing up all my files regularly has always been how slow the process is. But the technology for fast transfers is available now, and fairly cheap. Do it! With a fast drive, you can easily back up your work and library every day. (The trouble with cheaper ones, I’ve found, is that their real storage capacity is much lower, they’re pretty slow, and, more importantly, they’re susceptible to corruption over time).
4.) Sign up to PhilPeople and PhilPapers, and make sure you get publication alerts from PhilPapers, and conference and special issue alerts from PhilEvents. When you get them, read the digest through. This is the easiest way to keep on top of what’s new, and which topics are trending. When you’re ready to start publishing stuff, you can mine conference and special issue topics for ideas, as well of course as for venues to showcase your work.
For the nerds: Git solves this problem completely. Each paper goes in a separate folder, each folder is a git repo. If you change your paper a lot you can just put the changes on a new branch. I use tags to track my submissions to different conferences/journals.
Obviously you have to learn Git first, which is a bit of a task, so this isn’t going to be for everyone, but it works for me.
Have fun! Talk to everyone and go to everything. Join reading groups. Go to conferences as often as you can. (Get a credit card that is linked to whatever airline you will be using most often.) You will find lots of areas interesting – there’s something you’re missing if you don’t – pick the area where the people you like to be with, and talk to, the most are working: they will be your closest friends and colleagues and will be the people you work most closely with for the rest of your professional life. Speaking of which, remember that it’s a profession, one that is hopefully thrilling and fulfilling for you, but a profession all the same; approach it that way from day one in every sense of what that means. And, again, have fun – there is probably no more exciting point in your professional career than the days you will spend in graduate school.
“Don’t ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been… ever, for any reason whatsoever…”
Some of this post and discussion is completely outdated. It’s very easy to use Latex with AI help even if you’ve never done it before. Likewise, AI is better at generating appropriately formatted references than reference management software.
I spent an hour earlier this year correcting the references in the proofs of a paper in an edited collection. It turned out the editor had used Ai for the references and it had hallucinated a bunch of details. So maybe this is right, but use with caution. For myself, I’m sticking with bibtex.
(And if you are doing serious mathematics, you will no more want AI to do your equations than to do your text.)
Of course in high level mathematics you will not want AI to write your equations. But fix formatting bugs, maybe ? It will do it quickly and you can visually check if it worked. More generally, AI makes it quick and easy to start using Latex for those of us who are not high level mathematicians
Also, the model you use makes a big difference.
Which AI is better at generating appropriately formatted references than reference management software?
GPT 5, Thinking. At least it seems easier to me.
My query wasn’t about ease of use; I have no doubt any given AI tool is much easier to use. (Indeed I think one reason these tools have met with such widespread adoption is that they are very easy to use.) I was mostly interested in accuracy. My main concern with citations is that they’re accurate. Even if it’s easy to do, I’m not interested in generating inaccurate citations. Since my experience with AI is that it’s not very good at things requiring perfect accuracy, I was curious whether there was any that avoids this sort of worry. Would you say GPT 5 Thinking is better than reference manager software? Or merely easier?
I was definitely making the evaluation on the grounds of easyness. But it seems almost error free to me without having made a thorough evaluation. The non-paid less powerful models – which work even quicker – I’ve found made many errors. You have to factor into the evaluation here – in my opinion – that you can use AI to quickly find and fix its own errors when finalising the references.
I’m surprised you say that AI is bad at things requiring perfect accuracy. It is, after all, very good at coding. And my impression is that its screwups in coding come when the instructions require it to reason about how to execute non-trivially ambigious verbal instructions in code (even here, the latest models are extraordinarily good in certain ways).
As a grad student, I tried to live by John Cage’s rules for students and teachers (which apparently weren’t written by Cage):
Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
Rule 2: General duties as a student – Pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.
Rule 3: General duties as a teacher – Pull everything out of your students.
Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined – this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catches onto things.
Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
Rule 10: “We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X qualities.” (John Cage)
Helpful Hints:
Always Be Around.Come or go to everything.Always go to classes.Read everything you can get your hands on.Look at movies carefully and often.Save everything – it may come in handy later.
I’ve always heard these attributed to Corita Kent.