Advice on a research career
When I was a graduate student, I had the privilege of hearing Richard Hamming
speak to a group of graduate students about managing their research career. I was
pretty green in graduate school, so I probably didn't appreciate it completely
at the time. I still remember the event quite well, and as it turns out, Richard
Hamming gave his talk at MANY places, and several
people recorded different versions of it. I've shamelessly mirrored one of them
from http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~slu/on_research/hamming_advice.html because I think this is worth
repeating.
One thing that I am reminded of is that maintaining intellectual vitality in research
requires you to constantly reinvent yourself, using some of what you know already and
tackling new areas. I'm struck by the comments of Hamming in his article, because
it reminds me of something I do now at Google - namely crashing lunch tables in order
to talk to someone new. It's amazing what you can learn when you stop listening to
the same old problems!
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