Scott's tools/reference for graduate students in the UW School of Oceanography

Sample 6-month review plans and summaries(HTML)
Plans/goals: Winter 2001 | Fall 2001 | Spring 2002
Summaries: Winter 2001 | Fall 2001 | Spring 2002
More examples here...

Dissertation proposal (HTML)

General exam presentation (MS Powerpoint format)

Final exam presentation (PDF)

June, 2003: Phd thesis (pdf format) defended at the University of Washington School of Oceanography
Additional materials in the thesis directory: LaTeX files and resources (see the eric and Thurnherr directories for excellent examples and tricks), figures in PostScript format, bib(liography) files, puff model and associated animations, etc.

Finally, despite initially feeling dorky about it, I found that I made faster progress by tracking long-term goals and keeping a daily log of my activities because I could assess my time management performance and search through the log to remember the details of past actions, calculations, etc.

Fall 2001 AGU poster presentation (MS Powerpoint format)
Also available: abstract (gif format)

Fall 2000 AGU poster presentation (MS Powerpoint format)

To remember about approach:

(primarily from Pete Jumar's "Doing Science" pages)...

  1. The Ph.D. is generally the first practice at defining major portions of one's own questions.
  2. Accomplish a piece of theory, a piece of field work, and a piece of laboratory work as part of your Ph.D. research.
  3. Good models follow good data. One good observation is worth a thousand simulations.

Handy related links