A collection of guides for graduate students in Rebecca's lab at Penn State. These cover the full arc of a PhD — from reading your first paper to writing your dissertation and beyond.
Start with the onboarding guides if you are new. Everything else is organized roughly by when you will need it.
- Joining the Lab — first two weeks, email signature, IDP, and what the PhD arc looks like
- Weekly Meetings and Updates — how 1-on-1s work and what Rebecca needs from you each week
- Finding and Organizing Literature — Google Scholar, Research Rabbit, Zotero
- How to Read a Paper — active reading strategies and what to take notes on
- Finding Data — sources for datasets and how to evaluate them
- Reproducible Research — project structure, environments, data provenance, and ML leakage pitfalls
- AI Tools for Research — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and how to use any of them well
- Using AI Effectively: Worked Examples — 6 annotated examples showing real prompts for research and advising tasks, with explanations of why each prompt is structured the way it is
- Writing a Research Paper — the LEAP method: start with results and work outward
- Writing a Literature Review — synthesis over summary, the synthesis matrix, and building to the gap
- Responding to Peer Review — reading the decision, the point-by-point response, and disagreeing well
- LaTeX and Overleaf — getting started with LaTeX for academic writing
- Making Figures — how to make figures that are clear, honest, and publication-ready
- Giving a Presentation — structure, delivery, Q&A, slide template, and the dissertation defense
- Conferences and Posters — choosing conferences, abstracts, posters, networking, and travel funding
- PhD Milestones — committee meetings, comprehensive exam, dissertation, and graduating
- Authorship and Collaboration — who counts as an author, CRediT roles, author order, and avoiding disputes
- Mentoring an Undergraduate Researcher — scoping a project, weekly cadence, documentation, and credit
- Git and GitHub — version control basics for researchers
- Measuring Academic Impact — h-index, citations, ORCID, altmetrics, and how much to care
- Academic Job Search — how to find, apply for, and land an academic position
Downloadable lab files for students:
- labTemplate.pptx — Heritage 3D Lab PowerPoint slide template
- logo-signature.pptx — email signature template with lab logo
- letterhead.docx — official lab letterhead
- IDP_Template.docx — Individual Development Plan template
- paper-outline.md — research paper outline in LEAP order with key-sentence prompts
- response-to-reviewers.md — point-by-point reviewer response skeleton
- committee-report-outline.md — fill-in structure for the annual committee meeting report
The following sections still need Rebecca's input and are marked with TODO inside each file.
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joining-the-lab.md— accounts/tools checklist for new students; people to meet; what success looks like in this lab -
phd-milestones.md— oral comp defense experience and what to expect; ETD admin steps and deadlines; post-defense process -
giving-a-presentation.md— delivery tips (pacing, nerves, eye contact) -
academic-job-search.md— Rebecca's advice section -
conferences.md— the lab's core conferences and rough deadlines; travel funding sources and process -
authorship.md— lab conventions for author order (last-author default, order among multiple students, corresponding author) -
responding-to-peer-review.md— preferred review window and what to send before resubmitting -
joining-the-lab.md— IDP template, email signature, PhD arc (done) -
phd-milestones.md— committee meeting format, comprehensive proposal structure, papers-to-dissertation model, lab offboarding checklist (done) -
giving-a-presentation.md— slide design, BEAM checklist, defense timing and format (done) -
academic-job-search.md— written from scratch (done) - AI worked examples — see ai-prompting/
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responding-to-peer-review.md+ response template — written from scratch (done) -
reproducible-research.md— written from scratch (done) -
writing-a-literature-review.md— written from scratch (done) -
conferences.md— written from scratch (done) -
authorship.md— written from scratch (done) -
mentoring-undergrads.md— written from scratch (done) -
templates/committee-report-outline.md— extracted from phd-milestones prose (done)