A Small Reading List for New PhD Students

It's my first semester being on the other side! Giving advice is so fun because it validates all of my life choices! I put together a list of reading for my own students and thought others might find it useful too.

• You and Your Research, a talk by Turing Award winning mathematician Richard Hamming with so much good advice: work hard; don't be afraid to work on small problems; learn to tolerate ambiguity.
• The Passion Trap: How the Search for Your Life's Work is Making Your Working Life Miserable by Georgetown Computer Science professor Cal Newport, on how you should expect to do work and then fall in love with it, rather than the other way around.
• David Allen on How to Fix Your Life by a journalist at The Atlantic, on setting up your life so you can focus.
• What Else Should Grad Students Be Learning? by Harvard Computer Science professor Michael Mitzenmacher, on important non-technical skills PhD students should learn.
• On Productivity in Grad School by me. It's harder to summarize your own writing.

I would also like to reiterate advice from my undergraduate professor Radhika Nagpal that it's important to take all advice with a grain of salt, as  most of it is wishful thinking and highlights. I would like to add that taking productivity advice from other people is about as useful as taking diet advice from fashion magazines. Everyone has different goals and everyone is working with different biology and a different environment. The concept of "productivity" seems to also be subject to various strange fads.

Even so, I would love to hear your recommendations.