Dear postgraduate students

Everyone says selecting your supervisor(s) will make or break obtaining your degree with a sound mind. This is true. So here are a few of my own tips on just how to do that. I hope it helps.

(Thread)

1. Know what you need from the get-go. As people, and as students, we need different things to succeed. Ensure you know what this is for you and make your search and eventual selection of a supervisor based on that.

2. How do you know which academic does what? Either email a number of potential academics or organise a quick in-person/online meeting with them to discuss their respective research interests. You can either align yourself to these or ask if they’re willing to take you on but...

...supervise a topic outside of their own research interests. It’s not unheard of but just depends on them.

3. Ask them about their supervision style, what works for them and assess whether that sounds like it would work for you. You can love their research topics but if you feel like they won’t be a good enough supervisor, find someone else. Remember you’re going to be spending...

50 Common Mistakes most developers make while starting out

A thread🧵👇

⚡️1. Focusing on completing courses instead of coding (or completing projects) .

⚡️2. Skipping the fundamentals.

⚡️3. Not joining a developer community.

⚡️4. Not creating projects from scratch.

⚡️5. Skipping Data Structures.

⚡️6. Not reading the documentation.

⚡️7. Trying to learn everything in one day.

⚡️8. Blindly following the tutorial and not extending the code or making their own version of code.

⚡️9. Not asking for help when needed.

⚡️10. Never commenting the code (In required places).

⚡️11. Endlessly Planning instead of Building.

⚡️12. Learning different technologies instead of mastering one.

⚡️13. Not reading stuff (books/articles/documentation).

⚡️14. Not maintaining a balance between programming and not programming.

⚡️15. Not finishing what they started

⚡️16. Not building stuff they care about.

⚡️17. Getting overwhelmed by others' progress/headstart

⚡️18. Not knowing when to quite and start over.

⚡️19. Not practising enough.

⚡️20. Endlessly buying Udemy courses.

Grade Awarding 2021 - a thread.
1. For pupils and parents; it sounds daft but there isn’t much you can control right now. Teacher will play the main role in awarding grades, and there may well be some time or formal exam for subjects. But we don’t know exactly what yet.

2. What we do know is that all work pupils have done, their resilience over such a difficult time, their drive to keep going will make a difference to them. It’s never been more important for pupils to keep going, and keep engaging with the provision a school provides.

3. To our pupils? Have faith that the work you are doing will pay off. Please don’t lose heart right now. We love you lots and we all want you to excel. We are always here for you.

4. For school leaders - we need to build a year story. Right now they need a narrative that stresses the need to keep engaging in lessons. A letter every two weeks won’t get that job done. It’s never been more that pupils and parents feel connected to a school and we have clear

5. Communications cycles. Media - twitter/YouTube etc are vital tools for keeping our pupils and parents connected to school. This news cycle is vital for building a cultural expectation of what will happen when pupils set foot again in our school buildings.

This thread is for parents of teenagers. I have something for you: the first chapter of @ronlieber’s THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR COLLEGE. Because ye gods, here’s what we and our kids are facing.

Beyond obvious changes, like $$$ tuition prices, the system has changed from when we were in school. Nearly all colleges use so-called “merit-aid” to pay kids for good grades.

This is NOT need-based financial aid, and it’s not about expanding college access for the poor... it's an arms race by schools scrambling for US News rankings.

Tuition list prices are misleading at this point. College seats are more like airline seats, and your kid's actual price is calculated based on everything from his zip code... SAT scores... how much interest he and his cohort have shown in school X (yes they can figure that out.)

Ron has seen NYC high school classes in which three kids were offered admission to the same small school at three different prices-- and *none* of them had applied for need-based financial aid!

As you may know, asides sharing graduate school opportunities, I like to share practical insights and directional content that will give you a sense of what you are missing or not missing.

Serving you below:

HOW TO LEVERAGE "OPO" for grad school applications 👇

- A THREAD

2) OPO is an initialism coined from "Other People's Opportunities". This means you will be leveraging opportunities specific to others to your advantage. After this thread, you will stop asking:

"Can you share scholarships for Atmospheric Social Law"? 😂

(you get the drift).

3) PROCESS:

A) Once someone shares an opportunity. Say @olumuyiwaayo, @Jamaticulus or @AaronAkpuPhilip or myself shares an opportunity on our timeline, the first thing to do is to locate the name of the university and the country it is located.

4) (B) Type the name of the institution on Google and locate the website of your department. Often times, if there is a mass recruitment by the institution at the time you saw the ad, its likely there is something for prospective student looking to get into your department.

5) If otherwise, that is, if the ad you saw was particular to the advertised field, the leverage you have is that you are informed about the institution and you have the privilege to dig faculties.

(C) List the names of probable supervisors on the department's website.

1-Every prof and teacher I know is having a really hard time at end of term. Everyone is overwhelmed. So are our students. So are university staff and administrators (hard to believe, right?) Everyone is working night and day, feeling inefficient, overwhelmed...

2-One way to address this, for those still having classes post-Thanksgiving, is like a friend (everyone's anonymous in this thread: they can out themselves!) who told students, if they wished, they could end their term w all the work they'd done pre-Thanskgiving and be done.

3-Another friend announced post Thanksgiving that the final exam would be "open everything" and they could work together if they wishes as long as they also submitted a signed "study/crib sheet" along w the final. They warned working together might hurt them because it slows.

4-Another friend--genius scholar and prof at an Ivy--had a "PJ day" where they came to class in flannel pjs and students did to and they played them a thank you song for their resilience and care on the guitar (their Covid hobby is learning to play guitar).

5-Another friend called off a week of class and held "open collective off hours" in those slots where anyone could ask and talk about anything--the most responsive week they've had all term and everyone learned far more than usual and it nourished them all.

I posted earlier about Fake Ass getting bullied at school...
So let's take a look at some of his past tweets...the ones he forgot to delete before he became a US operative, US diplomat and clandestine....
These aren't photoshopped these are actual screenshots...

No wonder...

Here he says he was jumped...he has a way with the ladies....
He also says he never touches those girls...what did you really do Omastole, for them to jump you?
He also mentions his wrestling...

Maybe these tweets can give us a clue..
He also tells us his old school...
Linden High...New Jersey.

Linden high school...calas of 2010

@MattHancock says yet again that “Schools are safe”, because children are at low risk of serious disease.
With current v high disease prevalence (maybe 1 in 20 or 30 in #London ,#1in50 elsewhere) MORE children will catch #coronavirus & MORE children will become very ill. 1/8🧵

In itself that’s not good. There are some v sick kids around the country right now & because they often present differently they may not be diagnosed so quickly. Often with gastrointestinal & joint symptoms & odd rashes. Parents & educators may not be aware of this. 2/8

Families, especially those in large multigenerational or BAME households are already at increased risk of severe #COVID19.
#Teachers & #earlyyears staff in JAN 21 STILL have virtually no #PPE. There will be many over 50s & others who are CV/CEV. This is not good. 3/8

The families of <18s are at increased risk. We know that.
I’ll keep showing this 👇because Gvmt keep ignoring it.
And the lack of adequate & appropriate #PPE puts all staff in these settings AND their families at increased risk.
This is not good. 4/8

So the “Schools are safe” mantra which is repeated over & over again can ONLY be based on the risk to children of severe disease VS the risk of them missing school.
NOTHING OR NO ONE ELSE.
In the midst of a deadly pandemic this is as bizarre as it is callous & ignorant. 5/8

THREAD on the Ofqual consultation.

The exams situation is a fiasco on top of a debacle. Yes - loads of kids have missed out on schooling. That is bad. Yes - the provision across the system is the most unequal it has been in living memory. That is bad.

The solution proposed by the DfE and Ofqual is to get teachers to submit a grade that they think their students are “performing at”. Here there are a number of problems:

Problem 1: what does “performing at” a grade even mean? An exam grade is comparative - if someone has any particular grade all it tells you is where they are compared to their peers. There is NO SUCH THING as “grade 6 content” or “working at grade 6”.

This is as true in maths, where content is cumulative, as it is in something like English, where examination is much more subjective. If you ask teachers all across the country to grade, you will get substantial variability because objective criteria simply do not exist.

That’s not our fault, it’s not a training need, its not that we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s literally the way the system has been designed. You can’t train someone in a concept that does not exist.

You know what I don’t miss? Parent teacher conferences.

Most of Rocketkid’s teachers were lovely, but we had two that still stick out in my mind as sad/hilarious.

The first one, he was in elementary school. The teacher said it was ‘important’ for us to come in.

1/

So we worried about that for two days until the meeting. What could be wrong? It’s scary for parents to be left hanging like that.

So we meet his teacher, goatee and sunglasses...we live in the boonies and yet there’s something here like he’s trying to be a player.

2/

Not like a lady-player, like he’s got an image of himself in his head. We like teachers, but this guy’s manner is just weirdly kind of pushy a little bit.

Anyway, we sit does in the kid chairs, he’s behind his desk, again, weirdly focused on ‘power,’ somehow.

No idea why,

3/

We ask about our son, he acts as if he forgot that’s why we’re there, says some random stuff, all normal, nothing at all worthy of a conference. I mean, contact and communication is important, but thus just feels off-the cuff entirely.

4/

So then suddenly he gets really intense, but pretends being casual. Like it just occurred to him.

And he says to me, ‘So, I hear you’re a writer.’

What?

I tell him yes, I write comics and some animation and stuff.

He says. ‘I looked you up.’

5/

a higher and higher % of DMs, emails, etc. to me are from indians asking about their genetics. since there are 700 million indians on the internet. makes sense

i'll be publishing my 6K-word essay in indian genetics https://t.co/ycMGoZh13z

but some general points 1/n

- there's a lot of structure. which means you can look at an indian's genome and get an immediate sense of things and a little digging get's granularity very quickly

eg i guessed @suryasays family's jati after about 15 minutes (he was vague about this and had to ask mom)

- a lot of the variation is not partitioned geographically. very different from europe & china where geography is the dominant predictive variable.

indians have lots of structure which means non-geographical (jati) matter a lot. tamil brahmins more like UPites than other tamils

- the 'india-cline' pioneered by reich patterson is pretty explanatory. on one end you have west eurasian adjacent groups. jatts ppl in the NW and upper caste. and other end something away from them (more toward andamese). dalits, southerners etc.

- some groups are off the cline. that means they are not well modeled by the distribution. e.g.,

* parsies (75% iranian)
* bengalis (5-20% east asian)

I got the feedback today that my views on schools were too confident

I will die on this hill; hold to me to it

School closure will be the absolute worst public policy decision for the generation to come

The most discriminatory, net neg & cruel

It will be found to have made nearly no dent in the spread of the virus

The risks to teachers and staff will be found to be modest & modifiable

But the damage to kids and the very institution of public schools will be cataclysmic

The stories of undetected child abuse will be so powerful that every person who thinks it is reasonable to close schools, in this irrational way we have done in the US, will change their tune overnight

The damage to upward mobility will fall along class and racial lines, and this country will be more feudal

The fate of the nation itself-- democracy and those who participate in it-- will be made vulnerable.

Starting PhD student pro tips:

- Keep a backlog of “small ideas” that you don’t find the time to work on. Soon enough you will be asked to supervise undergrad students in some capacity, and these ideas will be exactly what they need to get started.

- In the first two years worry about learning and getting settled in your research field. In year 3+ you can worry about churning out papers (but that’s much easier of you have a good understanding of the field and its methods).

- Believe your advisor on strategy matters, believe in yourself when it comes to details and results (we have good intuition about what’s interesting and important, but only you know what you have actually done and what it means).

- Talk to other students as often as you can. No, they likely won’t know how to solve the specific issue you are currently having, but over time you will learn more from your colleagues than from your advisor.

- Relatedly, other people (your advisor, other profs, other students, reviewers) are neither idiots nor almighty gods of knowledge. They will have insights, but some of the things they tell you will turn out to be garbage.

New Report: Funding students instead of institutions in Georgia

What if you could avoid competition forever?

How to Build a Personal Monopoly with @david_perell + @jackbutcher

THREAD👇

1/ What is a personal monopoly?

The intersection of...

• Curiosity: What do you care about?

• Competence: What are you good at?

• Character: Who are you?

These combinations SHRINK the area of competition.

"Competition is for losers."
@peterthiel

2/ Where to Start

"You can't connect the dots looking forward: you can only connect them looking backwards."
-- Steve Jobs

Trust your curiosity and intuition.

Only curiosity creates uniqueness.

3/ BUTCHER'S FRAMEWORK

DICE = Diverge, Converge, Emerge

DIVERGE (Collect Dots): Pursue things you're interested in

CONVERGE (Connect Dots): Find the connections among interesting things

EMERGE: You've found where to start. Now attack it everyday.

4/ "Make a single decision to eliminate 1,000 decisions."
-- @tferriss

For @visualizevalue + @jackbutcher: How do you visualize something to make it simpler?

Eliminate anything that doesn't compound towards achieving that goal.