[Math] On starting graduate school and common pitfalls…

mathematics-educationsoft-question

Hi,

I'll be starting graduate school soon, and when I look back at my college career, there are certain things I wish I could have done differently. In hindsight, I wished I wasn't in such a rush to study [insert your favorite hot topic here] as opposed to pinning down the fundamentals of the course materials I was studying. Probably the best class I took was a seminar where the prof had us read and discuss from classic texts in differential geometry and pdes. Anyways, now that I'm starting graduate school, I'd like to avoid other common pitfalls that graduate students make. So my question is:

What are common pitfalls, mistakes or
misconceptions that you wished
somebody had told you were wrong? I'm
interested in pretty much anything
from how to conduct research, to what
courses to take, or anything else.

Best Answer

Marie desJardins has a nice article on Surviving Graduate School that is definitely worth reading.

The top two pieces of advice I would give are:

  1. The most important thing when choosing an advisor is to find someone who will go out of his or her way to help you succeed, not someone who is famous, and not even someone whose research is in the right area.

  2. You need to make the transition from being a mathematics student to being a mathematician. That means thinking of mathematics as an arena where you seek out unsolved problems and obsess over them until you solve them, not as a vast sea of material to be learned. Don't get sidetracked trying to learn everything; that's impossible. Focus on finding an open problem you can solve, and solve it.