Behavioural Science Blog

The Science of Human Behaviour

Graduate School 101

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For me, being a graduate student is very different from being a undergrad student. Doors open that were closed before, funds become available, that did not exist before and you get more 1on1 time with  your favorite supervisor.

But being a grad student means not only you got a new job – you also got a new family (your research group). It’s a entirely new game and you need to know the rules if you want to be successful.

I personally found the grad skool rulz from orgtheory.net to be most enlightening. It really gives you soem insights into the “doing research” business that are hard to get from the outside. Hopefully this will help you to take the right decisions during your grad student time.

Personally, I especially liked the parts about dissertation writing:

#11: What to do while you are working on the dissertation.

#12: Writing your dissertation, part 1.

#13: Writing your dissertation, part 2.

#14: Sorry, you can’t write your dissertation in 15 minutes a day.

Have fun reading and leave a comment if you found this information to be helpful! Also feel free to link to more ressources that you did find helpfull during your grad student time / writing your dissertation.

Written by Martin Metzmacher

June 29, 2009 at 12:18 pm

Guest posting rule for the Behavioural Science blog

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Okay…so you have been reading my blog. You are amazed by the sharpness of my thoughts and the beauty of my writing style. You are a big fan and you would like to be like me. The first step could be making a nice blog post and publishing it on this blog (yes I am happy to share some fame with you). I am very happy with quality submissions and I enjoy reading everything that people send to me. So please give it a go!

On the other site you might have a crappy affiliate website and you are looking for a top-site with PR4 to give you a nice backlink. Actually I believe that this is the reason of 99% of the people asking me if they could write a guest post – how sad.

Let’s be very clear on this: You will not get a backlink for writing total crap. For example in a potential guest posting last week, the first sentence stated something like “Behavioural science is an interesting subfield of psychoanalysis…”). If you are interested in behavioural science (and not totally stupid), you probably cried out loud just now – I know I did.

To make it easy on you and spare you the experience of receiving my feedback on your paper I would like to point out a few things I expect from a guest post in the blog.

DO’s

  • scientific / empirical orientation
  • readable English
  • include references 
  • one page or more
  • relevant to the field of Behavioural Science

DONT’s

  • copy & past from Wikipedia / other websites
  • submit content that has already been published elsewhere

I hope this is an encouragement for people willing to write quality stuff and will not keep you from submitting. I am really a nice guy and always looking to broaden my horizon. So just contact me and have a casual brainstorm about what you could write!

Written by Martin Metzmacher

June 26, 2009 at 11:59 am

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How do you like to consume your information?

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Hi guys…

I am really looking for input on which direction I should take in the development of this blog. So I thought – why not ask you – the reader? Please take a second to fill out the poll:

Written by Martin Metzmacher

June 12, 2009 at 1:37 am

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