Have you ever considered how people who are more knowledgeable about something than you got that way? A lot of them got there by asking the right questions. The reality is that most people are not going to bother to explain themselves to you if you don’t bother to come to them with questions. Some people don’t realize that you don’t know the things they know.

Hi! Here is a linkdump. I told myself I would post these with really minimal context because I am too busy to summarize these things and have a really giant backlog of links I’ve been wanting to post, but uh, the writer in me won out and I failed. Some of these have way more description than others. But I do also have quotes I’ve pulled for some of them, so maybe that will help make this post more interesting.

About a year ago, while I was only a few weeks into the first graduate-level course I ever took, I tried asking a bunch of grad students what the difference between taking courses at the graduate level and the undergraduate level is. Being researchers in training (researchers are, in my experience, terrible at explaining themselves), they gave me delightful non-answers such as “it’s not that different” (this is a lie) and “your professors treat you like adults” (whatever that means).

Look, I’ve watched so many terrible presentations at this point that I couldn’t put off writing this anymore, so here, have this imagined Q&A. If you feel attacked by any of these questions, I’m sorry. I’m nicer in real life, I promise. In my defence, this post was meant to be sort of tongue in cheek, and it’s not targeted at anyone in particular.

If you want straight advice (read: you don’t want to wade through the sarcasm), I have other posts about this topic, which you can read here.

“Networking” seems to be one of those buzzwords that everyone uses and nobody can properly define, which I find extremely annoying. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and maybe I can help offer some clarity. I’m starting to think that there might be two types of networking, which I’m going to refer to as “warm networking” and “cold networking”. If you’re familiar with the idea of “warm contacts” vs “cold contacts”, that’s where I’m borrowing this terminology from.