Orientation Guide.
Starting out as a graduate student in the weather and climate sciences, there’s a lot to get your head around. First and foremost, you need to get up-to-speed on the latest literature relevant to your research. While this can be a daunting task, as an expert in the field your supervisor can provide much needed guidance. In many cases, what can be more difficult is all the ancillary stuff that goes along with conducting a substantial research project. Like it or not, the success of your project also depends on your skills in computer programming, data management, word processing, and self promotion.
There’s a lot to learn in mastering these skills, which means your supervisor will almost certainly not have the time, inclination and/or knowledge to help you with all of them. Instead, graduate students are typically left to figure these things out for themselves, usually though a combination of pestering their colleagues and searching on Google. While most students are ultimately successful, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a basic orientation guide for newcomers, just to make the process a little easier?
By collecting up all the relevant posts from this blog, this page is my attempt at provide one such orientation guide…
Chapter 1: Programming and data analysis
(a) The basics
- Picking the right programming language
- Software installation explained
- Getting past a programming impasse
- What’s in your bag?
(b) Python
- Getting started with Python
- The weather/climate Python stack
- Data Carpentry for atmosphere and ocean scientists
(c) Best practices
- Programming with style
- Testing your code
- Speeding up your code
- Workflow automation
- Data analysis and ocean model grids
- Best practices for scientific computing
- Best practices for scientific software
- Plugging into the computational best practice discussion
Chapter 2: Managing your code and data
Chapter 3: Writing and publishing
- How to write a reproducible paper
- Authorea: the future of scientific writing?
- The future of journal submissions
- Journal envy (and rankings)
Chapter 4: Reading (and listening)
- Check out my bookshelf!
- Podcasting comes to weather and climate science
- Taking advantage of open education resources
Chapter 5: Managing your career
- Keeping up with the job market
- ResearcherID and your email signature
- Getting credit for the work you do
Chapter 6: Managing your life
Dr Climate 
Excelllent! I read your blog when I am a PhD and now I ask my students to do the same. It is amazing that it is still updating.