A repo for open resources & information for people to succeed in PhD in CS & career in AI / NLP
1,100
93 commits
updated Feb 17, 2026
This repo originates with a wish to promote Global Equality for people who want to do a PhD in NLP, following the idea that mentorship programs are an effective way to fight against segregation, according to The Human Networks (Jackson, 2019). Specifically, we wish people from all over the world and with all types of backgrounds can share the same source of information, so that success will be a reward to those who are determined and hardworking, regardless of external contrainsts.
One non-negligible reason for success is access to information, such as (1) knowing what a PhD in NLP is like, (2) knowing what top grad schools look for when reviewing PhD applications, (3) broadening your horizon of what is good work, (4) knowing how careers in NLP in both academia and industry are, and many others.
Contributor: Zhijing Jin (PhD student in NLP at Max Planck Institute & ETH, co-organizer of the ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program). You are welcome to be a collaborator, -- you can make an issue/pull request, and I can add you :).
Twitter: If you prefer to get more updates on Twitter, feel free to follow @ZhijingJin and @aclmentorship.
Contributor: Zhijing Jin (PhD student in NLP at Max Planck Institute & ETH, co-organizer of the ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program).
Endorsers of this repo: Prof Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan). Please add your name here (by a pull request) if you endorse this repo :).
Pre-PhD Research Opportunities:
Check all the specific suggestions under "Stage 2. (Doing PhD) How to Succeed in PhD?", such as the sections "What Is Weekly Meeting with Advisors like?", "How to Read Papers", and many others that you might need :).
Literature review tools:
Paper reading suggestions:
(Prof Yang Liu, Trevor Cohn, Bonnie Webber, and Yulan He) Advice on Reviewing for EMNLP (2020). [Suggestions]
(Dr. Anna Rogers, Prof. Isabelle Augenstein@University of Copenhagen) What Can We Do to Improve Peer Review in NLP? (2020). [Paper]
(Prof Shomir Wilson@Penn State University) Guide for Publishing in Conferences and Attending Them [Suggestions]
(Prof Emily M. Bender@UW) On Using Twitter (2020). [Suggestions]
(Timothy Ferriss, author of 4-Hour Workweek) 5 Tips for E-mailing Busy People (2008). [Suggestions]
(Prof Philip Guo@UCSD) The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (last updated: 2015). [Video] (For the book, you have to dig deeply, and then you will find the book.)
(Maithra Raghu, PhD from Cornell, Senior Research Scientist@Google Brain) Reflections on my (Machine Learning) PhD Journey (2020). [Article]
(Prof Tianqi Chen@CMU) 陈天奇：机器学习科研的十年 (2019) (A Chinese article about ten years of research in ML). [Article]
(Jean Yang) What My PhD Was Like. [Article]
The most important step: (Prof Jason Eisner@JHU) How to Find Research Problems (1997). [Suggestions]
(Christopher Olah, OpenAI) Research Taste Exercises (2021). [Article]
(Prof Richard Hamming, Turing award winner) You and Your Research (How a research journey is like & how do end up with great research) (1995). [Talk] [Transcript] [Transcript2]
Interesting snippets: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity.", "One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!", "I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.".
(Prof Stuart Card@Stanford) The PhD Thesis Deconstructed (2016). [Article]
Interesting snippets: "People basically read your paper to write theirs. Your ideas are more likely to spread if you help out.", "We once had a Nobel Laureate come talk to us about his ideas for how to do research. His surprising number 1 recommendation: Don’t work in an area that doesn’t have good funding.", "Table 1. Seismic scale of impact"
(Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI) How To Be Successful (2019). [Article]
Interesting snippets: "I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together... In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.", "One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution.", "you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.", "My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane.", "An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can.", "One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you.", "The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale."
(Tim Dettmers, PhD@UW) On Creativity in Academia (2019). [Article]
(Jason Wei, OpenAI) A few thoughts on doing AI research (2023). [Slides]
(Prof Jia-Bin Huang@UMaryland) How to come up with research ideas? (2021). [Suggestions]
(John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI) An Opinionated Guide to ML Research (e.g., horning your taste) (2020). [Suggestions]
Interesting snippets: "Goal-driven. Develop a vision of some new AI capabilities you’d like to achieve, and solve problems that bring you closer to that goal.", "If you are working on incremental ideas, be aware that their usefulness depends on their complexity.", "Consider how the biggests bursts of impactful work tend to be tightly clustered in a small number of research groups and institutions. That’s not because these people are dramatically smarter than everyone else, it’s because they have a higher density of expertise and perspective, which puts them a little ahead of the rest of the community, and thus they dominate in generating new results.", "Early on in your career, I recommend splitting your time about evenly between textbooks and papers. You should choose a small set of relevant textbooks and theses to gradually work through, and you should also reimplement the models and algorithms from your favorite papers."
(Prof Fei-Fei Li@Stanford) De-Mystifying Good Research and Good Papers (2014). [Suggestions]
Interesting snippets: "This means publishing papers is NOT about “this has not been published or written before, let me do it”, nor is it about “let me find an arcane little problem that can get me an easy poster”. It’s about “if I do this, I could offer a better solution to this important problem,” or “if I do this, I could add a genuinely new and important piece of knowledge to the field.” You should always conduct research with the goal that it could be directly used by many people (or industry). In other words, your research topic should have many ‘customers’, and your solution would be the one they want to use. A good research project is not about the past (i.e. obtaining a higher performance than the previous N papers). It’s about the future (i.e. inspiring N future papers to follow and cite you, N->\inf)."
List of fellowship opportunities to track:
(Compiled by CMU) Graduate Fellowship Opportunities [link]
(Robbie Allen) CS/HCI PhD Fellowships [link]
List of scholarships for different disciplines. [link]
CYD Fellowship for Grad Students in Switzerland [link]
How to Write a Good Fellowship Application:
(Daricia Wilkinson, PhD@Clemson) Towards Securing the Bag: Tips for Successful PhD Fellowship Applications (2019). [Article]
(Meta) Five tips for a successful Meta Research PhD Fellowship application from the people who review them (2020). [link]
(Meta) The six most common Fellowship questions, answered by Facebook Fellow Moses Namara (2020). [link]
(Meta) Fellowship 101: Facebook Fellow Daricia Wilkinson outlines the basics for PhDs (2020). [link]
(Meta) Applying twice: How Facebook Fellow David Pujol adjusted his application for success (2020). [link]
(Meta) Fellow spotlights, career advice, and more (up to date). [link]
The craft of Research by Wayne Booth, Greg Colomb and Joseph Williams.
How to write a better thesis by Paul Gruba and David Evans
Helping Doctoral Students to write by Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson
The unwritten rules of PhD research by Marian Petre and Gordon Rugg
(Prof Gregory Hager@JHU & Vivek Sarkar@Georgia Tech) Preparing a Tenure Dossier (2017). [Slides]
(University of Vermont) **RPT Guidelines for Tenure-Track and Tenured Faculty **(2015). [Guide]
(Prof G. Elisabeta Marai@UPitts) Example tenure package (2012). [Package] [Course proposal and summary]
(Prof Gerry Stahl@Drexel) Example tenure dossier (2007). [Document]
(Valdosta State University) Sample tenure and promotion dossier (2012). [Document]
Note: This has very detailed, survey-based evaluation of teaching.
(Prof Mary Jane Irwin@UPenn) Tenure (1999). [Guide]
(Prof Maria Klawe@UBC, Prof Mary Jane Irwin@UPenn) Session 1: The Tenure Decision. [Panel transcript]
All types of contributions to this resource list is welcome. Feel free to open a Pull Request.
Contact: Zhijing Jin, PhD in NLP at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, working on NLP & Causality.
@misc{resources2021jin,
author = {Zhijing Jin},
title = {Resources to Help Global Equality for PhDs in NLP},
year = {2021},
publisher = {GitHub},
journal = {GitHub repository},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/zhijing-jin/nlp-phd-global-equality}}
}
119 followers · starred Jul 2021
94 followers · starred Jun 2023
88 followers · starred Oct 2023
14 followers · starred Oct 2023
A repo for open resources & information for people to succeed in PhD in CS & career in AI / NLP
1,100
93 commits
updated Feb 17, 2026
This repo originates with a wish to promote Global Equality for people who want to do a PhD in NLP, following the idea that mentorship programs are an effective way to fight against segregation, according to The Human Networks (Jackson, 2019). Specifically, we wish people from all over the world and with all types of backgrounds can share the same source of information, so that success will be a reward to those who are determined and hardworking, regardless of external contrainsts.
One non-negligible reason for success is access to information, such as (1) knowing what a PhD in NLP is like, (2) knowing what top grad schools look for when reviewing PhD applications, (3) broadening your horizon of what is good work, (4) knowing how careers in NLP in both academia and industry are, and many others.
Contributor: Zhijing Jin (PhD student in NLP at Max Planck Institute & ETH, co-organizer of the ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program). You are welcome to be a collaborator, -- you can make an issue/pull request, and I can add you :).
Twitter: If you prefer to get more updates on Twitter, feel free to follow @ZhijingJin and @aclmentorship.
Contributor: Zhijing Jin (PhD student in NLP at Max Planck Institute & ETH, co-organizer of the ACL Year-Round Mentorship Program).
Endorsers of this repo: Prof Rada Mihalcea (University of Michigan). Please add your name here (by a pull request) if you endorse this repo :).
Pre-PhD Research Opportunities:
Check all the specific suggestions under "Stage 2. (Doing PhD) How to Succeed in PhD?", such as the sections "What Is Weekly Meeting with Advisors like?", "How to Read Papers", and many others that you might need :).
Literature review tools:
Paper reading suggestions:
(Prof Yang Liu, Trevor Cohn, Bonnie Webber, and Yulan He) Advice on Reviewing for EMNLP (2020). [Suggestions]
(Dr. Anna Rogers, Prof. Isabelle Augenstein@University of Copenhagen) What Can We Do to Improve Peer Review in NLP? (2020). [Paper]
(Prof Shomir Wilson@Penn State University) Guide for Publishing in Conferences and Attending Them [Suggestions]
(Prof Emily M. Bender@UW) On Using Twitter (2020). [Suggestions]
(Timothy Ferriss, author of 4-Hour Workweek) 5 Tips for E-mailing Busy People (2008). [Suggestions]
(Prof Philip Guo@UCSD) The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir (last updated: 2015). [Video] (For the book, you have to dig deeply, and then you will find the book.)
(Maithra Raghu, PhD from Cornell, Senior Research Scientist@Google Brain) Reflections on my (Machine Learning) PhD Journey (2020). [Article]
(Prof Tianqi Chen@CMU) 陈天奇：机器学习科研的十年 (2019) (A Chinese article about ten years of research in ML). [Article]
(Jean Yang) What My PhD Was Like. [Article]
The most important step: (Prof Jason Eisner@JHU) How to Find Research Problems (1997). [Suggestions]
(Christopher Olah, OpenAI) Research Taste Exercises (2021). [Article]
(Prof Richard Hamming, Turing award winner) You and Your Research (How a research journey is like & how do end up with great research) (1995). [Talk] [Transcript] [Transcript2]
Interesting snippets: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity.", "One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!", "I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.".
(Prof Stuart Card@Stanford) The PhD Thesis Deconstructed (2016). [Article]
Interesting snippets: "People basically read your paper to write theirs. Your ideas are more likely to spread if you help out.", "We once had a Nobel Laureate come talk to us about his ideas for how to do research. His surprising number 1 recommendation: Don’t work in an area that doesn’t have good funding.", "Table 1. Seismic scale of impact"
(Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI) How To Be Successful (2019). [Article]
Interesting snippets: "I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together... In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do.", "One of the most powerful lessons to learn is that you can figure out what to do in situations that seem to have no solution.", "you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.", "My other big sales tip is to show up in person whenever it’s important. When I was first starting out, I was always willing to get on a plane.", "An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can.", "One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you.", "The best way to make things that increase rapidly in value is by making things people want at scale."
(Tim Dettmers, PhD@UW) On Creativity in Academia (2019). [Article]
(Jason Wei, OpenAI) A few thoughts on doing AI research (2023). [Slides]
(Prof Jia-Bin Huang@UMaryland) How to come up with research ideas? (2021). [Suggestions]
(John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI) An Opinionated Guide to ML Research (e.g., horning your taste) (2020). [Suggestions]
Interesting snippets: "Goal-driven. Develop a vision of some new AI capabilities you’d like to achieve, and solve problems that bring you closer to that goal.", "If you are working on incremental ideas, be aware that their usefulness depends on their complexity.", "Consider how the biggests bursts of impactful work tend to be tightly clustered in a small number of research groups and institutions. That’s not because these people are dramatically smarter than everyone else, it’s because they have a higher density of expertise and perspective, which puts them a little ahead of the rest of the community, and thus they dominate in generating new results.", "Early on in your career, I recommend splitting your time about evenly between textbooks and papers. You should choose a small set of relevant textbooks and theses to gradually work through, and you should also reimplement the models and algorithms from your favorite papers."
(Prof Fei-Fei Li@Stanford) De-Mystifying Good Research and Good Papers (2014). [Suggestions]
Interesting snippets: "This means publishing papers is NOT about “this has not been published or written before, let me do it”, nor is it about “let me find an arcane little problem that can get me an easy poster”. It’s about “if I do this, I could offer a better solution to this important problem,” or “if I do this, I could add a genuinely new and important piece of knowledge to the field.” You should always conduct research with the goal that it could be directly used by many people (or industry). In other words, your research topic should have many ‘customers’, and your solution would be the one they want to use. A good research project is not about the past (i.e. obtaining a higher performance than the previous N papers). It’s about the future (i.e. inspiring N future papers to follow and cite you, N->\inf)."
List of fellowship opportunities to track:
(Compiled by CMU) Graduate Fellowship Opportunities [link]
(Robbie Allen) CS/HCI PhD Fellowships [link]
List of scholarships for different disciplines. [link]
CYD Fellowship for Grad Students in Switzerland [link]
How to Write a Good Fellowship Application:
(Daricia Wilkinson, PhD@Clemson) Towards Securing the Bag: Tips for Successful PhD Fellowship Applications (2019). [Article]
(Meta) Five tips for a successful Meta Research PhD Fellowship application from the people who review them (2020). [link]
(Meta) The six most common Fellowship questions, answered by Facebook Fellow Moses Namara (2020). [link]
(Meta) Fellowship 101: Facebook Fellow Daricia Wilkinson outlines the basics for PhDs (2020). [link]
(Meta) Applying twice: How Facebook Fellow David Pujol adjusted his application for success (2020). [link]
(Meta) Fellow spotlights, career advice, and more (up to date). [link]
The craft of Research by Wayne Booth, Greg Colomb and Joseph Williams.
How to write a better thesis by Paul Gruba and David Evans
Helping Doctoral Students to write by Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson
The unwritten rules of PhD research by Marian Petre and Gordon Rugg
(Prof Gregory Hager@JHU & Vivek Sarkar@Georgia Tech) Preparing a Tenure Dossier (2017). [Slides]
(University of Vermont) **RPT Guidelines for Tenure-Track and Tenured Faculty **(2015). [Guide]
(Prof G. Elisabeta Marai@UPitts) Example tenure package (2012). [Package] [Course proposal and summary]
(Prof Gerry Stahl@Drexel) Example tenure dossier (2007). [Document]
(Valdosta State University) Sample tenure and promotion dossier (2012). [Document]
Note: This has very detailed, survey-based evaluation of teaching.
(Prof Mary Jane Irwin@UPenn) Tenure (1999). [Guide]
(Prof Maria Klawe@UBC, Prof Mary Jane Irwin@UPenn) Session 1: The Tenure Decision. [Panel transcript]
All types of contributions to this resource list is welcome. Feel free to open a Pull Request.
Contact: Zhijing Jin, PhD in NLP at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, working on NLP & Causality.
@misc{resources2021jin,
author = {Zhijing Jin},
title = {Resources to Help Global Equality for PhDs in NLP},
year = {2021},
publisher = {GitHub},
journal = {GitHub repository},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/zhijing-jin/nlp-phd-global-equality}}
}
119 followers · starred Jul 2021
94 followers · starred Jun 2023
88 followers · starred Oct 2023
14 followers · starred Oct 2023