I recently saw a tweet that said something along the lines of “it ticks me off that high schools don’t prepare kids for schools like CalArts.” This idea kind of bugs me, because as someone who graduated from a magnet arts high school with a selective application process,

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).

Most of these are from today, but some are from yesterday, and a few are from last week. The descriptions will be short, since I am short on time.

For context, these are some things I learned in the process of putting together and delivering a guest lecture to a first-year discrete math course last summer. The talk was about the research I was doing at the time, and I was allotted about half an hour for the presentation. Again, I meant to write and post this last year, but clearly that didn’t happen.

I really meant to put this list up sometime last fall… whoops. (This is yet another incredibly overdue article.) Anyway, here are a whole bunch of things I learned while attempting to “do research” last summer, whatever that means. The big theme here is to make life easier for future you, who will have to wrangle together your several months of chaos and exploration into a rigorous and coherent narrative. Present you can help by being organized and breaking things down into smaller, documentable steps.