Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student

Manuel Blum:

READING, STUDYING, THINKING,
STARTING OFF on the PhD,
DEEP in the MIDDLE of the PhD,
WRITING it all up.
YOU

READING:
Books are not scrolls.
Scrolls must be read like the Torah from one end to the other.
Books are random access — a great innovation over scrolls.
Make use of this innovation! Do NOT feel obliged to read a book from beginning to end.
Permit yourself to open a book and start reading from anywhere.
In the case of mathematics or physics or anything especially hard, try to find something anything that you can understand.
Read what you can.
Write in the margins. (You know how useful that can be.)
Next time you come back to that book, you’ll be able to read more.
You can gradually learn extraordinarily hard things this way.

Consider writing what you read as you read it.
This is especially true if you’re intent on reading something hard.

I remember a professor of Mathematics at MIT,