Lessons I Learned From My Advisor

Lessons I Learned From My Advisor Words of Wisdom collected from GPS graduate students

When giving a talk, filling every slide with equations reaffirms your brilliance.

If your boots are melting, it’s too hot.

It’s ideal if you make your handouts in a recognizable form of the language used for instruction.

Trying to do an interpretive dance of the Tharsis bulge mostly just disturbs your students.

Using Comic Sans in your lectures makes it look like you’re teaching preschool.

There is a very definite right and wrong way to eat corn on the cob.

How to draw straight lines instead of curves.

The record for writing a Nature paper is 6 hours. Get started.

A fieldtrip for a class in diffusion would be about as much fun as watching paint dry.

Discover more solar system planets.

To an order of magnitude, you can figure out anything.

You have to ask yourself if your time is better spent working.

How to make people feel stupid: it’s mostly in your facial expression.

Think deeply in three dimensions.

Don’t do it unless you want to look like an idiot.

If you can’t impress them with science, show an animation.

Don’t be intimidated by facts.

The camera adds 10 dork points.

But the TV camera adds 100.

Classes aren’t important . . . but I didn’t tell you that.

Having kids is a great excuse for skipping those group meetings and department seminars you just don’t want to go to.

When you figure out how the program works, add it to the manual.

Sometimes your research group is like the mafia: just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in.

A bad acronym is better than no acronym.

It’s all about the figures. Introduction: It’s all about the figures.

It’s obvious.

“My what?”