This topic probably happen between you (the thesis advisor) and the first author (your grad student) for almost every paper: what is the author list and order?
Daniel Wessel at Organizing Creativity has a short and very interesting post on this subject: Authorship of Scientific Articles | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY.
A worthy read and numerous useful links.
For an undergrad student, applying and getting a summer job in a research group can be a life changing experience. This is when you will get a taste of what doing scientific research, along side graduate students, feels like. For many, this is all the necessary push needed to apply to graduate studies.
As a follow up to the post “PhD project or PhD projects?“, here is a simple and effective post by Seth Godin:
The best creative solutions don’t come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented.
They come from inventing new questions.
Two of my PhD students have successfully defended their thesis in the past three weeks. For both of them, they have accomplished what constituted the biggest project (in term of scope and time) of their life yet.
However, is it really one project or a collection of multiple projects forming a whole, called a PhD thesis?
“Short cuts make for long delays.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Last week was the Canadian university football final (Vanier Cup). My University was playing, its 8th final since 1999 (won its 7th!). For the past 10 years, they have been the dominating team of their division. Not bad for a team that did not exist until the middle of the 90’s (and for some was doomed to failure). It is a model of success. Attendance to home games now averaged 15000 peoples. This number is small compare to US college football but is 2 to 3 times higher than most Canadian university program. Of course, this helps the program, money-wise…
Ruminating... 