اكاديمية القلم لشؤون البحث العلمي
📚23 Books That Fix 99% of PhD Problems
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🖊THE COMMON PHD PROBLEMS FALL INTO 4 CATEGORIES:
1. Academic writing/reading🖊
2. Transferable skills📌
3. Finding a job in industry after a PhD🔍
4. PhD productivity and motivation (aka, surviving your PhD).🗃
23 Books That Fix 99% of PhD Problems:
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1. 📘 A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertation
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This book has all anybody writing something scientific could need. MSc students writing their thesis, a PhD student writing a first paper or even more senior scientists. There’s a bit for everybody here, and it is good stuff.
2. 📕 Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English
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While English is the de facto language of science, most scientists are non-native English speakers. And that you notice when you read their papers. Have you noticed how some papers read effortlessly, like they are easy and enjoyable? While others feel like a big struggle? It’s not about their content, it’s how they are written.
3. 📗 On Writing Well
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So this is THE book for all writers that want to be good writers. The biggest tip I took away from it was to use simple words and short sentences. Something we don’t follow in our scientific publications. It’s long and dense, but packed with timeless and field-less (does that word exist?) advice.
4. 📙 The Literature Review: Six Steps to Success
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From the little literature available on literature reviews, this book stands out. It will take you from zero to hero and guide you through the process of L.R. It will take all that could of knowledge and papers you have read and help you distill it into a concise review.
5. 📕 How to Tame Your PhD?
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The Thesis Whisperer could be the best blog for PhD students. It covers all possible advice PhD students’ need, from managing your supervisor to dealing with PhD depression. This book is a compendium of their best posts. While it still reads like a collection of blog posts, its advice is so good that it is becoming the best book with general advice for PhD students.
6. 📗 The Smart Way to Your Ph.D.
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Dora Farkas is one of the best PhD coaches. She helps students finish their thesis. Plain and simple. In this book she interviews 200 graduates to find the best strategies to finish a PhD. No nonsense, no fluff, just what has worked for them.
7. 📘 Getting What You Came For
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This book is an oldie but a good ie. It’s similar to the other books in this category. Choose this book if you need extra help on getting accepted for a PhD, as it devotes quite some pages to that topic.
8. 📙 The No Asshole Rule
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This book is mostly about how to get rid of assholes at the workplace. While you might not get rid of your supervisor, the tips on dealing with assholes might come in handy. The book is quite short and easy to read. Avoid it if you cannot handle foul language.
9. 📕 Coping with Difficult People
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This classic book presents a list of stereotypes of difficult people and how to deal with them. Most likely your professor fits in one of those stereotypes. If you want to learn how to manipulate your prof, this is your book.
10. 📗 The 4-Hour Workweek
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This is what the book is about: maximize you’re per hour output. Forget its laziness promoting, get-rich-quick scam title. It provides you with a wealth of principles, strategies and hacks to make the most of every single hour. You choose if you use this knowledge to work fewer hours or work the same amount of hours but producing much more than before.
11. 📘 The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
This is one of the biggest and best self-help books ever. It provides you with a framework to make better decisions and guide your life. Its implications go so deep that you can use this book to beat procrastination, set goals, but also improve relationships. It’s one of those books that always provides a new useful insight depending on your circumstances and what you ask.
12. 📙 Manage Your Day-to-Day
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This is a book written by the people behind Behance and 99U, a company and blog for creative professionals. They share awesome advice on productivity, daily routines and thinking process for creatives. Remember, you are an artist, you are creating stuff, so this advice applies to you. Especially worth a read the chapter about training your mind to be more creative. Why? Because, you, are, a, creator.
13. 📖 The Power of Habit
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Want to write consistently? Read every day? Produce great work consistently?
Many bloggers and podcasts are going crazy with the habits, rituals and daily routines of successful people. The premise is that you can change your old bad habits by good habits if you know know. Having a morning routine is essential for a productive day. Well, this is the book that started it all. After reading this book you will see that it’s not so difficult to create a new better you.
14. 📔 Think and Grow Rich
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This is a classic book on personal growth. It teaches you how people train their mind and develop the right mindset to do great things. It focuses on, you guessed it right, becoming rich. Of course we need to translate it to PhD language. So instead of growing rich, we think of becoming a great PhD graduate. Instead of riches, we want to accumulate publications, discoveries, talks at conferences. You catch my drift.
15. 📓 Start with Why
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This is a great book to discover why you want to do a PhD. If you don’t know your “why”, you can’t motivate yourself to wake up 5am to write another version of your first publication. This book focuses on the whys of businesses, but the same principle you can apply to people.
16. 📙 The Professor Is In
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The best thing of this book is that it tells you all the challenges, all the hoops you need to trough to succeed in Academia. She does the 80/20 analysis for you on how to invest your efforts to maximize your results.
17. 📘 A PhD Is Not Enough!
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This is one of the most comprehensive books on the wide topic of “how go from PhD to a successful career in Academia?”. It revisits the classics like giving presentations and how to write a paper. It also covers advanced topics like getting funded or establishing your own group (something I missed in The Professor Is In).
18. 📗 Networking for Nerds
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While the title might seem self-explanatory, this book targets scientists and engineers. It offers classic networking advice, like networking at events, with modern advice, like using LinkedIn. All from the perspective of scientific folks. So waste no time and grab a copy.
19. 📕 How to Win Friends and Influence People?
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This is classic on networking, or better said, how to be likeable. If people like you, all doors will open for you. The main premise here is: it’s not about you, it’s about the other person, and you need to make her/him feel special. As simple as that. Don’t miss this book, it’s that good.
20. 📓 Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
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How do you talk to people in the poster session of a conference? How do you talk to your future supervisor? How do you talk in your first interview for a job in Industry after your PhD?
This book is about details. Those crucial details that can take you to new levels.
When you are a big shot in Industry or land tenure and look back at the defining moments that took you there, you will see that talking with confidence to the right person at the right moment was key. This book will help you with the talking.
21. 📔 The Personal MBA
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Read this book if you want to understand business. If you want to learn the business jargon. If you want to hold a conversation when transitioning to industry and don’t sound fake.
This book is the result of many followers asking him to put all that knowledge in a book. What you see in this book is what you get if you enroll in a full-time MBA, just 31134 times cheaper. The only thing you won’t get is the networking potential an MBA offers you.
22. 📘 Data Science for Business
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This book focuses on all the analytical techniques used in data science, mostly related to machine learning. It also relates them to business applications. It’s a good book to have when you want to refresh your knowledge of a technique you haven’t used recently.
23. 📔 Data Scientist: The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Data Scientist
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This book describes how to start a career in data science and how to thrive. From how to network, to developing the right skills (hard and soft), this book offers actionable advice and a clear description of the career path you will follow as a data scientist.
