Thanks for writing this, much insight and honesty. I sense that your Mother's talent for sociology has rubbed off on you, don't you think? I see it both in your choice of and approach to research (interviews, case studies, etc. as opposed to purely technical), and in the way you recognized and clarified the socio-political barriers to graduating (the subtleties in finding the right project and people).

A couple of childhood friends just finished their third year of their PhD programs, one in molecular biology and the other in physical chemistry, and are very much in that all-too-common third/fourth year rut. I wish they'd had this to read three years ago!

Great read Philip. It brings back many fond, and sometimes not-so-fond memories.

I actually chuckled during some of those early chapters... "It takes 4 weeks to write a good paper." Followed later by, "We ended up submitting an embarrassing jumble of text filled with typos, nonsensical sentence fragments, graphics without any explanations, and no concluding paragraphs. It was a horrid mess." It's even funnier when something like that gets accepted (or the really polished one gets rejected!).

I plan to send this to some of the more junior grad students I know!

Hey, sorry for scooping you if that messed something up :)

I heard you'd graduated, so I wandered over to your site today. Didn't realize you'd put up this article so recently.

oh, no worries at all! in fact, i just shipped today. thanks for posting, ethan.

This is certainly a great read, especially since I am a PhD student in the middle of the process and find some of my papers in the resubmitting phase.

I am sitting at an airport on my way back from a top-tier conference and the Epilogue on Page 99 resonates so much with my own experiences. Thanks a lot for writing this :)

Really liked the Burrito tool. I'll definitely give it a try. It feels like it could be a perfect companion with iPython notebook (which sadly lacks version control and lab notes).

thanks! just to warn you -- it is definitely "research-quality" code. out of all the tools i built for my dissertation, CDE is the only one that's remotely usable ... everything else is just a proof-of-concept.