Career Advice and Reflections

My biggest passion is not doing research (myself), but mentoring and supervision. I especially enjoy mentoring research students, PhD students, and ECRs (early career researchers). Based on a lot of personal feedback (and a shelf full of presents) as well as a very high research output of those I supervised (usually 1 top-tier publication per PhD student and year, and sometimes also from small undergraduate research projects; see list of project supervisions), I believe I'm not doing a bad job (at least not always). Hence, I created this page to share some of the advice and reflections I've found worth passing on, including resources for further reading. (Let me know what you disagree with or what should be added.)

But first, I'd like to ground everybody in a bit of humility: those who are outstandingly successful* might be mistaken in believing it's all due to their own efforts, leading to some putting their noses into the air. I love the following video by Veritasium, pointing out the survivor bias and how much luck one requires to even get there. (It also helps those who had less luck so far, to motivate them keep pushing forward!) Hope you enjoy it:

(* I'd also like to add that "success" is a matter of your personal definition; and a win/investment in one area usually goes hand in hand with losing in another -- a fact not everybody always sees. In that sense, both reactions to learning about an outstanding track record (say, many publications per year) are perfectly valid: "wow, amazing!" and "sad...". :))

Back to the topic!

Early Career researchers (say, post-docs or very young Professors) might have slightly different questions or concerns than PhD students or even undergrads who are still wondering whether they should do a PhD in the first place (and whether they'd like to stay in academia/research or go to industry afterwards). I hence will structure this page along these two main categories.

I didn't compile a full page yet (will do so in the future at some point), but until then have a few point that might still be useful already:

Undergraduate and PhD Student Advice

• I gave an invited talk at ICAPS Launchpad 2025, with slides available here, covering multiple different topics. This is the talk announcement: Doing a PhD can feel like solving a partially observable planning problem with ill-defined actions and an unknown goal. In this talk, I’ll reflect on my own (decidedly suboptimal) trajectory and the heuristics I wish I had early on. Topics include choosing research directions, the power of colleagues and reviewing, and time management strategies, among others. It’s a mix of reflections and well-meant advice — some of it hopefully helping to derive a better policy for navigating a PhD (and convincing you to start one in the first place).
• Check out my section on thesis writing advice, as it contains several resources including a "LaTeX template" that also contains a list of (very!) frequently done LaTeX/typesetting errors and points towards typical marking guides etc.

ECR Advice

• At the Third SET & SysCom HDR/ECR Conference 2024 of UNSW Canberra, I gave an invited talk on Success in Academia. 80% overlap with the presentation linked above -- and those parts that do overlap are actually much, much better in the above presentation (since it's newer), yet there is one section here (on academia vs. industry) which isn't included in the above.