22 January 2008

Steele's rants

J. Michael Steele, a professor of statistics here at Penn, has a page of humorous quotes, some of which refer to probability and statistics. He also has some "rants", which include the non-ranty Advice for Graduate Students in Statistics. I can't vouch for how good this advice is -- it's hard for me to judge anything that purports to advise someone going through the process that I am currently a part of -- but it at least sounds good, and I've found myself thinking of little pieces of this page from time to time over the last few months. (I took a class from Steele last semester, and probably discovered this back in September; looking for information that advises me on what to do as a graduate student is one of the less damaging ways in which I procrastinate. It helps that these pages rarely say "don't procrastinate!", although they do say things like "work consistently", which is similar. I characterize this as "less damaging" because I suspect that I may have internalized some of the advice I've seen, and will remember it when I am seriously immersing myself in research. That date is not all that far in the future.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I envy that you took a class with Steele. I stumbled across his rants pages a few months ago and found them both humorous and insightful. After a little more poking around his site I saw that he'd written a book - "The Cauchy-Schwarz Master Class" - and after reading a few reviews decided to buy a copy. It's a great book and I can only imagine his classes must be filled with the same curiosity, rigour and fun.