成功博士的三大要素（翻译）——3 qualities of successful Ph.D. students: Perseverance, tenacity and cogency

本文转载自3 qualities of successful Ph.D. students: Perseverance, tenacity and cogency
成为一个成功的博士需要具备的三个要素，希望能给菜鸡的我带来一些指导。
此外还参考了其他网友的翻译[转载]成功博士生的3种品质。

Every fall, a fresh crop of Ph.D. students arrives.
每年秋天，都会有一批博士新生到来。
Since I’m actively looking for Ph.D. students, I get the same question a dozen times every year: “How long does it take to get a Ph.D.?”
自从我开始招收博士生依赖，每年都会被问到一个同样的问题：“拿到博士学位需要多长时间？”
This isn’t the right question.
这不是一个好问题（问题不该这么问）。
“Ph.D. school takes as long as you want it to,” I tell them. There’s no speed limit on how fast you can jump through all the hoops.
我告诉他们：“你想读多久就可以读多久”。没有捷径来完成这一切。
A better question to ask is, “What makes a Ph.D. student successful?”
更有意义的问题是：“怎样成为一个成功的博士？”
Having watched Ph.D. students succeed and fail at four universities, I infer that success in graduate school hinges on three qualities: perseverance, tenacity and cogency.
在四个学校目睹了众多博士生的成功或者失败，我总结了博士成功毕业的三个要素：毅力，韧性，
If you’re in Ph.D. school or you’re thinking about it, read on.
如果你是个在读博士或者对读博有所想法，读下去吧。

What doesn’t matter 聪明与否是不重要的

There’s a ruinous misconception that a Ph.D. must be smart. This can’t be true.
有一种毁灭性的误解——博士一定是很聪明的。这种想法是不对的。

A smart person would know better than to get a Ph.D.
真正的聪明人可不会选择读博士这条路。

“Smart” qualities like brilliance and quick-thinking are irrelevant in Ph.D. school. Students that have made it through so far on brilliance and quick-thinking alone wash out of Ph.D. programs with nagging predictability. Let there be no doubt: brilliance and quick-thinking are valuable in other pursuits. But, they’re neither sufficient nor necessary in science.
诸如才华横溢、思维敏捷之类的聪明特征和博士学位的关系不大。那些凭借才华横溢和思维敏捷就想获得博士学位的学生，往往会因为不可思议的原因被淘汰。但是不要怀疑这些品质在其他领域的重要性。但是，它们在科学研究中并不是必须的。

Certainly, being smart helps. But, it won’t get the job done.
诚然，聪明很有用，但紧靠聪明不能帮你完成学业。

Moreover, as anyone going through Ph.D. school can tell you: people of less than first-class intelligence make it across the finish line and leave, Ph.D. in hand.
每个这个正在攻读博士学位的人都会告诉你：智力不是顶尖的人也可以到达终点并获得博士学位。

As my advisor used to tell me, “Whenever I felt depressed in grad school–when I worried I wasn’t going to finish my Ph.D.–I looked at the people dumber than me finishing theirs, and I would think to myself, if that idiot can get a Ph.D., dammit, so can I.”
正如我的导师曾经告诉我的那样：“每当我对读研究生感到沮丧，担心自己不能拿到博士学位时，
我就看着那些比我还菜的博士毕业生，然后对自己说，如果那些白痴都可以拿到博士学位，我当然也可以。”

Since becoming a professor, I finding myself repeating a corollary of this observation, but I replace “getting a Ph.D.” with “obtaining grant funding.”
成为教授以后，我发现自己重复了这一观点的推论，但我将“获得博士学位”替换为“获得资金”。

Update: Within a month of writing that last line, I was awarded my first three grants.
更新：在撰写最后一行的一个月内，我获得了前三笔资助。

Perseverance 毅力

To escape with a Ph.D., you must meaningfully extend the boundary of human knowledge. More exactly, you must convince a panel of experts guarding the boundary that you have done so.
要想拿到博士学位，你必须努力扩展人类的知识边界。更准确的说，你必须让评审专家相信你做到了这一点。

You can take classes and read papers to figure out where the boundary lies. That’s easy.
通过上课和看文献，你能很轻易地找到边界所在。

But, when it comes time to actually extend that boundary, you have to get into your bunker and prepare for the onslaught of failure.
但是，想要真正地拓宽这个边界，你必须准备好接受接二连三的失败。

A lot of Ph.D. students get depressed when they reach the boundary, because there’s no longer a test to cram for or a procedure to follow. This is the point (2-3 years in) where attrition peaks.
因为没有需要应付的考试和遵循的程序，许多博士生在到达边界后感到压力很大。在攻读博士的第2-3年内，这种压力会到达顶峰。（那就来吧）

Finding a problem to solve is rarely a problem itself. Every field is brimming with open problems. If finding a problem is hard, you’re in the wrong field. The real hard part, of course, is solving an open problem. After all, if someone could tell you how to solve it, it wouldn’t be open.（Open Problem就是所谓未解决的问题。而一个Open Problem有了解决方案后，就成为closed-ended question）
寻找问题本身就是个问题，每个研究领域都充斥着无数 open problems，即未解的难题。如果找不到问题，说明你选错专业了。真正的困难在于问题的解决。如果有人告诉你怎么去解决一个问题，那这个问题就不属于open problem。

To survive this period, you have to be willing to fail from the moment you wake to the moment your head hits the pillow. You must be willing to fail for days on end, for months on end and maybe even for years on end. The skill you accrete during this trauma is the ability to imagine plausible solutions, and to estimate the likelihood that an approach will work.
要想度过这个阶段，你必须不断经历失败，一天接一天，一月接一月，甚至一年接一年。在这期间，你会掌握提出解决方案并估计其实现可能性的技能。

If you persevere to the end of this phase, your mind will intuit solutions to problems in ways that it didn’t and couldn’t before. You won’t know how your mind does this. (I don’t know how mine does it.) It just will.
如果能坚持到最后，你就能以前所未有的方式来提出问题的解决方案。甚至你自己都不知道怎么做到的。

As you acquire this skill, you’ll be launching fledgling papers at peer reviewers, checking to see if others think what you’re doing qualifies as research yet. Since acceptance rates at good venues range between 8% and 25%, most or all of your papers will be rejected. You just have to hope that you’ll eventually figure out how to get your work published. If you stick with it long enough and work at it hard enough, you will.
一旦你获得了这项技能，你就可以把论文雏形交给同行的评论者，让他们看看你是否符合研究资格。由于论文的接受率介于8％和25％之间，因此你的大部分或全部论文都将被拒绝。你只能祈祷自己的论文能够发表。如果你能付出足够的时间和足够的努力，你一定能成功的。

For students that excelled as undergraduates, the sudden and constant barrage of rejection and failure is jarring. If you have an ego problem, Ph.D. school will fix it. With a vengeance. (Some egos seem to recover afterward.)
对于优秀的新生，这些突如其来又连续不断的失败和拒绝是很难接受的。如果你有自负自大的毛病，读博士可以帮你改掉。不过有些自负后来又恢复了。

This phase of the Ph.D. demands perseverance–in the face of uncertainty, in the face of rejection and in the face of frustration.
因此，博士生需要有坚持不懈的毅力，来面对未知、拒绝和挫折。

Tenacity 坚韧

To get a tenure-track professorship after Ph.D. school, you need an additional quality: tenacity. Since there are few tenure-track faculty positions available, there is a fierce (yet civil) competition to get them.
想在博士毕业后拿到终身教职，你需要另一项品质：坚韧。由于终身教职特别稀缺，因此要进行激烈（但是文明）的竞争。

In computer science, a competitive faculty candidate will have about 10 publications, and 3-5 of those will be at “selective” or “Tier 1” venues (crudely, less than 33% acceptance rate). A Ph.D. by itself won’t even get you a job interview anymore.
在计算机科学领域，一名具有竞争优势的候选者通常需要有10篇左右的出版物，其中3-5篇应该属于精选或第一等级的（录用率不到33％的那种）。单单依靠博士学位的话，你可能走不到面试这一步。

There are few good reasons to get a Ph.D. “Because you want to become a professor” might be the only good one. Ironically, there’s a good chance you won’t realize that you want to be a professor until the end of grad school. So, if you’re going to do Ph.D. school at all, do it right, for your own sake.
读博的理由有很多， “想当一名教授”可能是其中最好的。讽刺的是，你很有可能在毕业后才意识到自己想成为一名教授。因此，如果你要去读博，那么一定要找到自己的兴趣所在。

To become professor, you can’t have just one discovery or solve just one open problem. You have to solve several, and get each solution published. As you exit graduate school, an arc connecting your results should emerge, proving to faculties that your research has a profitable path forward.
想成为教授，你不能只解决一个科学难题。你必须解决足够多的难题，并且发表相应的论文。当你博士毕业的时候，你的研究成果会形成一条路径，证明你的研究有可观的前进道路。

You will also need to actively, even aggressively, forge relationships with scholars in your field. Researchers in your field need to know who you are and what you’re doing. They need to be interested in what you’re doing too.
你还需要积极地与你所在领域的学者建立关系。你所在领域的研究人员需要知道你是谁以及你在做什么。他们也会对你的研究感兴趣。

None of that is going to happen by itself.
当然，这些都不会自然发生，需要你自己去努力。

Cogency 表达和写作能力

Finally, a good Ph.D. student must have the ability to clearly and forcefully articulate their ideas–in person and in writing.
最后，一个博士必须能够清晰准确地表达自己的观点，无论口述还是写作。

Science is as much an act of persuasion as it is an act of discovery.
科学既是一项发现工作，也是一项说服工作。

Once you’ve made a discovery, you have to persuade experts that you’ve made a legitimate, meaningful contribution. This is harder to do than it seems. Simply showing experts “the data” isn’t going to work. (Yes, in a perfect world, this would be sufficient.)
一旦你做出口了一项发现，你就必须说服专家们相信你做出了有意义的工作。这看上去是很难的。仅仅把数据展示给专家看是不够的。（当然在理想状态下，这就够了）

Instead, you have to spoon-feed the experts. As you write, you have to consciously minimize the amount of time and cognitive pain it takes for them to realize you’ve made a discovery.
事实上，你需要把你的成果一点一点地填到专家的脑子里。在撰写文章时，你必须有意识地减少他们认识到你的贡献所需要的时间和努力。

You may have to go “on tour” and give engaging presentations to get people excited about your research. When you give conference talks, you want them eagerly awaiting the next episode.
你可能需要进行有趣的演讲，从而使人们对你的研究感到兴奋。当你论辩时，你要让他们急切等待着你的下一段陈述。

You will have to write compelling abstracts and introductions that hook the reader and make her feel like investing time in your work.
你必须写出精彩的摘要和介绍，让读者对你的工作感兴趣。

You will have to learn how to balance clarity and precision, so that your ideas come across without either ambiguity or stifling formality.
你必须学会如何在清晰和精确之间取得平衡，这样你的想法就不会模棱两可或拘泥于形式。

Generally, grad students don’t arrive with the ability to communicate well. This is a skill that they forge in grad school. The sooner acquired, the better.
一般来说，新来的研究生并没有很好的沟通能力。他们要在研究生院获得这一技能，而且越快获得越好。

Unfortunately, the only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. 10,000 hours is the magical number folks throw around to become an expert at something. You’ll never even get close to 10,000 hours of writing by writing papers.
不幸的是，提高写作水平的唯一方法是大量的写作。10000小时是人们为了成为某件事的专家而付出的最少时间。但是你肯定没有那么多的时间来写论文。

Assuming negligible practice writing for public consumption before graduate school, if you take six years to get through grad school, you can hit 10,000 hours by writing about 5 hours a day. (Toward the end of a Ph.D., it’s not uncommon to break 12 hours of writing in a day.)
假设在研究生毕业前为公众消费而进行的写作练习微不足道，如果你花6年时间读完研究生，每天写作5个小时就可以达到10000个小时。（在读博后期，一天进行12个小时的写作是常态。）

That’s why I recommend that new students start a blog. Even if no one else reads it, start one. You don’t even have to write about your research. Practicing the act of writing is all that matters.
这就是为什么我建议每个新生都去开一个博客。即使没有人回去看你写的东西，你也要开始练习写作。你甚至不用写和专业相关的内容，练习写作能力才是关键。

总结

子曰：知之者不如好之者，好之者不如乐之者。对于常人来说，很难做到对科研的热爱，从中找到真正的乐趣。我自认为现在还没有这种热爱，因此需要更多的手段来巩固自己的科研道路，不能懈怠。从这篇文章中，得到以下启示：

第一，对未来路上的困难、挫折、失败做好心理准备，不知道会有到少，但是知道会有的。第二，在坚持下去的基础上，培养各种能力，从论文的发表到读博的最终目标，找到自己的兴趣所在，塑造自己的科研道路。第三，不仅要会做，还要会说，做一说二是吹牛，做二说一是嘴笨，能做到有一说一，还说的比较精彩就不错了。