None of this replaces a supervisor. It is the advice a good supervisor gives before the project has a name.

How to read a paper

Read the title and the figures before you read the abstract’s adjectives. For each figure, write one sentence: what was compared, and what would have made the panel fail. Then read the methods far enough to know the organism, the sample size, and the control. Only then let the abstract tell you what the authors think it means. You are checking their translation, not receiving a verdict.

A discussion that cites only papers from the same laboratory is a weather report from inside one room. Look for the paper they had to argue with. If a claim is important, someone reputable has doubted a piece of it. The publications page is a way into the rooms where those arguments live. The note on significance is the statistical half of the same habit.

A question you can actually finish

A student-sized question names a comparison you can complete with the time and tools you really have. “How does the brain work?” is a career, not a project. “Do the two oak species on this path leaf out on different dates, and is the difference stable across three weeks?” can be finished, drawn, and doubted. The field notebook described in the blog is the instrument.

Write, before you collect anything, the result that would change your mind. If no result would, you have a preference, not a question. Negative results belong in the notebook in the same ink as the others. A supervisor who is any good notices the honesty before the heroics.

A life in the subject is wider than one job title

Professor is a real job and a rare one relative to the number of people trained toward it. Biology also employs technicians who keep a culture collection honest, clinical-research staff who keep a trial honest, conservation officers, school teachers, science editors, regulatory reviewers, bioinformaticians, and people who maintain the instruments without which the famous name has no data. Several of those paths are more compatible with a life than the path that is advertised on the poster.

The selected job links are a way to see the advertisements as they actually are, including fellowships that decide whether a PhD is fundable. Read them as a landscape, not as a promise. This site does not place you in any of them.