As a professor I know how much of the fun I have in my work and the success of my efforts depends on super human graduate students who do research in my group. And that is a rhetorical question. The answer is a lot, perhaps the single most important factor. So doubtless I, and all my faculty colleagues, spend a lot of cycles thinking about which graduate students to select and then observing how they work on their research tasks and then working with them so that they are even more effective. So here is my distillation of the qualities that I see among the successful graduate students. Like the original list of 7 habits of effective people, this one too does not apply to all successful graduate students. But I would hazard a guess that if you do not have a good many of these 7 habits, you are unlikely to succeed as a graduate researcher. Also I want to stay away from “motherhood and apple pie” kind of generic golden qualities, which we all instinctively know are good, but want to be more specific.
Continue reading “7 Habits of Highly Effective Graduate Students”
