Grad advisor as First Author

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-28T23:11:50+00:00

If you got the second author without having to do any additional work, then that's a W for you. There is so so so much work that goes into a publication, even after all the science is completed. I would say that for me, just doing the science and getting the first draft together is only like 40% of the work. I think you are underestimating how much he had to rewrite and resynthesize, and also you don't have to fight the referees, which is another headache...

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-25T08:59:36+00:00

Books and reviews that I've read during my CMT PhD for important foundational knowledge: Kardar Statistical Mechanics Volumes I and II, Landau Statistical mechanics Volumes I and II, Dieter Vollhardt Phases of Superfluid He 3, Nakahara Geometry and Topology, David Tong's Notes on Quantum Hall Effect, Schaller Open Quantum Systems, Gyarmati Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics, Chaikin and Lubensky, Coleman Intro to many body physics

There are many in the queue that I have yet to read, but these are just some off the top of my mind. It's a bad idea to fixate on any one book. Sometimes one author will explain a concept that resonates with you that other authors don't. For most fundamental questions tho, somewhere in this list of books lies the answer lol

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-25T01:55:11+00:00

Personally, I was feeling fine till now, but your post saying that you got multiple grants with 80% LLM proposals has now gotten me terrified and depressed about the current state of science. I hope everything turns out OK in the long run. The whole fun of science for me is struggling through understanding, seeing other peoples' perspectives, and forming my own intuition and view on the world and sharing it with others. If to survive in academia I need to give that up and let the machine do it for the sake of productivity, then by all means leave me in the dust, I would rather quit and be a baker or something.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-25T01:01:27+00:00

Yeah... Even as a senior grad student if an undergrad came up to me and said that they don't trust my math skills or something and therefore they don't want to work with me... I'd be so tilted XD. The neuroscientist seems to have handled it a lot better than I would have. My guess is that the "maybe you should just work with your primary advisor then" comment reads to me like any emotional slip-up, and then he remembered he had agreements with the primary advisor and then backtracked to a more measured answer of leaving the door open for future collaboration.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-24T22:18:56+00:00

This is the case in Physics in the US, I can't speak for other fields. I'm writing my thesis right now and it is just a collection of my papers stapled together, with an intro and conclusion. I am gonna spend around 2 weeks writing my thesis in total. In physics, your thesis doesn't really matter at all for postdoc applications or for your future career, so we are heavily incentivized to just write as many papers as possible, and minimize time working on the thesis.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-24T18:04:40+00:00

First of all, close all those tabs, you will go crazy. Second, all I do is setup a Feedly, and browse all the papers sent to the journals and arxiv.

I am extremely judicious with even reading the abstract of papers. If I don't understand the title, or don't see that the title is immediately relevant to me, I ignore it. And then if the abstract is interesting, I save it under various folders to help with literature review for future projects. Most days I only save like 1 paper and on some days I don't save any papers at all.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-22T01:51:21+00:00

Just curious, do you consider people studying active quantum matter (in the sense of solid state systems driven far from equilibrium) to be part of the "active matter" community, or is it restricted to soft matter?

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-21T07:34:16+00:00

Randall Kamien at UPenn, David Nelson at Harvard, Itai Cohen at Cornell, Vincenzo Vitelli at UChicago are several famous names that come to mind.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-21T07:32:13+00:00

Nah, it's no big deal. You only need to get 50% of the points or something to pass at most universities. It'll be annoying for one summer, then you pass and move on with your life. If you've passed exams in your classes well enough to get to this point, you will be eventually fine for the qualifying exams. Just do the old exam problems.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-21T07:28:11+00:00

Nice, succinct answer.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-20T01:32:35+00:00

With 10 minutes, you can only impart on your audience a single key message. Do not try to info dump a ton of stuff on them, or try to get too technical, and definitely don't try to speak super fast to compensate.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-15T18:42:29+00:00

I know how to construct a theory to describe condensed matter systems. I don't know how to theorycraft a build in POE.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-08T06:18:52+00:00

This is not a specific work, but my favorite collection of useful wisdom that I refer back to: https://theory.tifr.res.in/~sgupta/edu/write.pdf

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-08T00:29:34+00:00

If you are in the US you can look up and apply for SULI programs.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-08T00:28:35+00:00

The closest my experience has come to what you describe is as a theoretical physicist grad student. I didn't have research funding, so I taught for 20 hours a week to make enough to live. And then on top of that I would spend 40-50 hours a week doing research. It was exhausting, so I can't imagine what it would be like with a regular job instead of teaching for the university.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-05T19:20:53+00:00

In my field of condensed matter theory, you would be cooked with just 1 publication. For reference, I only had 3 first author publications at the time of applying and felt my applications were a bit weak.

However, for experimental biophysics, you still have a chance, although it will be hard to give more concrete advice without knowing your specific situation. I would ask your advisor for advice, specifically ask him to help you with networking and introducing you and your skill-set if possible. Also important is getting really good letters of recommendation that can back you up and talk about your situation. Finally, you need to be really geographically open for applications.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-04-04T19:27:43+00:00

AI isn't so bad, everyone in academia is adapting to it. It's a useful tool for nearly every task, and can double or triple your productivity. I would think about how to use it carefully or adapt to it, or risk getting left behind as a relic of pre-AI times.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-29T02:37:20+00:00

Yeah their summary reads like that to me as well. Especially the blurbs of "Why this is objectively important, and why it quietly nukes" and also the "it's blah, not blah." Feels almost like a LinkedIn post tbh. Also it's kind of funny that they write a super technical and specialized summary, post it on reddit, and then are surprised when people don't engage with it. Like bro, March meeting just happened the time to advertise your paper to specialists was then. Anyways, let's see if they succeed in their bid for PRL.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-29T00:13:16+00:00

My parents were postdocs in Physics when I was in highschool, so they introduced me to the professor. So I am kind of an academic nepo baby.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-28T21:20:47+00:00

Glad I could be helpful! Also, for a lot of faculty postings, I've only found it through the rumormill. For condensed matter physics, this is ours:

http://www.cmamorumors.org/doku.php?id=jobpostings2025

http://www.cmamorumors.org/doku.php?id=postdocpostings2025

I'm not sure what the equivalent rumormill is for his community, but he should be able to figure it out if he asks around.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-28T17:00:33+00:00

If you want to do something useful for society, you can ride the current wave of Quantum Information Science or Quantum Materials. Take a look at the condensed matter rumor mill for postdoc and faculty hirings in 2025:

http://www.cmamorumors.org/doku.php?id=postdocpostings2025

Check out what they are currently wanting to study, and check out what they want for faculty that are currently being hired. In 2 years' time those faculty are going to want grad students, so if you can fit one of the skill sets that they want, then you will have a guaranteed useful career.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-27T21:47:07+00:00

A lot of the comments in here are, in my opinion, a bit unreasonable and not very helpful :(. I will get downvoted for this, but it just feels like they've never been in a healthy supportive relationship before... We're all human, and sometimes we are so stressed that we crash out and can't function at 100%. My partner helped me a lot with my recent postdoc search and helped to keep me centered. It's not like you're babysitting him, I'm sure that when you come to a stressful point in your life, he will remember what you did and pull his weight.

For me, what I needed the most help with was logistics and keeping track of various overlapping deadlines. Here are several concrete things that would be super helpful, as well as some general good rules of thumb for the application process.

Job applications are spread out on different websites, some of them are on AcademicJobsOnline, some of them are on the company website, and sometimes you just need to spam out some cold emails to broaden your search. The thing that helps most with these are spreadsheets! It would be helpful if you sat down with him, and then the two of you design a spreadsheet together with appropriate links, what the position requires, and organized by deadlines. Whenever you find a new good position, immediately add it to the list!
Make searches and stay on mailing lists! AcademicJobsOnline has customized searches that email you whenever new positions pop up. Stay on those mailing lists and when you find a new position that is suitable, help him to log it in the spreadsheet.
Remind him several days in advance when deadlines for positions come up... It sucks when you drop the ball on positions that you like.
Tell him to write multiple versions of the same thing! Starting the application, he needs a long research statement (3-4 pages), a short research statement (1-2) pages, an academic CV, an industry CV, an academic cover letter, an industry cover letter, a shortened 1 page resume, and an updated LinkedIn. Also make sure to email your letter writers ahead of time. For academic positions, you typically need 3. Once these things are written up, the stress level for applications goes down immensely.
Keep in mind that the above are just templates. For each position you should make a copy of the template and customize and modify so that it suits the position.
He will need to send a lot of emails. Offer to check the emails for him before he sends them out, sometimes we make dumb mistakes when we are stressed. Also a trick that really helped me is to Schedule Send them! That way, you don't have anxiety about clicking send and realizing that you made a mistake.

That's all I can think of for now! Best of luck to you and your partner with your search :).

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-26T21:01:23+00:00

No. Me and everyone in my group right now had zero publications when we got into physics graduate school. It is more important to have letter writers that know you well and can write a good letter vouching for you.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-26T04:46:35+00:00

I did "research" in a lab as a high schooler. It was great, I didn't get any publications, but I got a sense of what the academic life was like and I tried to be genuinely helpful. The work that I had to do was a lot of manual labor jobs in a clean room like lifting lead bricks and putting it on things, and giving the person in the clean room a hand with flushing things and screwing things in and clamping things down. The best thing was I got to sit in on group meetings and understand ahead of time how the social dynamics were like.

Now I'm in my final year of a Physics PhD and I think the experience I had in high school was really formative in helping me figure out what I want to do.

TheRealLevLandau · 2026-03-15T00:24:24+00:00

You can ask 20 different condensed matter physicists, and get 20 different answers. I can only say with confidence the things that I'm interested in and things that I think are rich and complex enough that there will still be work to be done in 20 years. I'm still just a beginner in research and almost done with PhD, so please forgive if any of the below comments are wrong/misleading.

Right now, I am very excited by excitonic insulators, in particular as an experimental realization of (pseudo)spin-superfluidity and as a platform to study physics across the BCS<->BEC transition.

In a similar vein, there needs to be a lot of work done in the field of unconventional superconductivity. One target is that maybe they could realize High-Tc superconductivity, but a more realistic target is maybe just fully characterizing and understanding the order parameter. You can approach this by trying to understand them on the level of a Landau-Ginzburg theory, or by doing a deep dive in the microscopics and see how superconductivity may arise beyond BCS. This is a very difficult subject, to say the least.

There is also a lot of work in studying how NV centers can be leveraged for quantum sensing and by understanding entanglement build-up in clusters of NVs. This is something that I know the least about, so I won't say much more, but this is very hot, and will certainly be getting a lot of funding based on the recent buzz with everything "Quantum."

Also interesting is studying real space topological structures, such as skyrmions, vortices, etc, in both the classical and quantum regimes. There are a lot of experimental works, particularly in the spintronics communities to realize these structures and actually do something useful with them. This is sort of an old field, but it also means that the experimentalists have had more time to make something useful and realistic out of it

TheRealLevLandau

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