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You treat it like any other job. The people who are writing these kinds of papers are actual career scientists. You start with a literature review and textbook

You treat it like any other job. The people who are writing these kinds of papers are actual career scientists. You start with a literature review and textbook search. read 5-10 different undergraduate astronomy and physics text books, then undertake a current literature review. Do searches in science journals that you might get free from your local library, or the library associated with your alma mater if you have connections there still. That gets you the basic knowledge needed. Next is the hard part, using current state of knowledge, finding current data sets, finding your own algorithms for "scratching your own itch" Writing the script/programming is the last step - the least skilled step. Imagine you are John Carmack writing Doom for the first time. He had to know the math, look for "at the time state of the art" university dissertations regarding 3d rendering and occlusion, etc and combine that with his own knowledge about coding, assembly language, and put all that together to make Doom run on the hardware he had access to at the time. It's exactly the same for any field. Be humble, learn the basics, get caught up on current research, read deeply, read other people's disserations and ideas, then using what you have, and combine it with other people's ideas, and then you start the programming part (or you can hire people to code it for you, nothing wrong with that). and that's how it works. We all stand on the shoulders of giants who come before us.

dontbenebby 4y ago
> You treat it like any other job. The people who are writing these kinds of papers are actual career scientists. I would have done that, but my future advisor repeatedly broke their promises about basic things like whether a thesis by publication (several papers vs one on a common theme) was an acceptable path, then when I tried to pivot to industry folks made emotional decisions any time I interviewed for a role that was not a precarious smart money position. >Be humble, learn the basics I've made career decisions for over a decade because anytime I encounter complex math, the person instructing me has an attitude like yours, paired with a complete inability to teach. (For example, I took a course that was on statistics specifically for use in psychology... we did many, many exercises with specific software and techniques, then did an exam using... none of them. That kind of rapid shift, paired with an attitude of "if you can't learn from my schitzoid teaching style, you don't belong here" drove me into a deep depression, since everyone I knew who had about the same level of statistics and programming knowledge as me had years of teaching in K-12, not a smarthering of summer camps and self learning in between a school year where if you used the wrong tone, they'd draw blood on you. >We all stand on the shoulders of giants who come before us. Despite the harsh tone of the two comments prior to this, I agree, but be very mindful if you say things like "learn the basics" you can connect someone who is willing with a teacher who will do so, or be prepared for a string of angry internet comments on nights when someone doesn't feel like quietly watching pirated movies another night in a row to self soothe their economic precarity.

dontbenebby 4y ago

> You treat it like any other job. The people who are writing these kinds of papers are actual career scientists. I would have done that, but my future advisor repeatedly broke their promises about basic things like whether a thesis by publication (several papers vs one on a common theme) was an acceptable path, then when I tried to pivot to industry folks made emotional decisions any time I interviewed for a role that was not a precarious smart money position. >Be humble, learn the basics I've made career decisions for over a decade because anytime I encounter complex math, the person instructing me has an attitude like yours, paired with a complete inability to teach. (For example, I took a course that was on statistics specifically for use in psychology... we did many, many exercises with specific software and techniques, then did an exam using... none of them. That kind of rapid shift, paired with an attitude of "if you can't learn from my schitzoid teaching style, you don't belong here" drove me into a deep depression, since everyone I knew who had about the same level of statistics and programming knowledge as me had years of teaching in K-12, not a smarthering of summer camps and self learning in between a school year where if you used the wrong tone, they'd draw blood on you. >We all stand on the shoulders of giants who come before us. Despite the harsh tone of the two comments prior to this, I agree, but be very mindful if you say things like "learn the basics" you can connect someone who is willing with a teacher who will do so, or be prepared for a string of angry internet comments on nights when someone doesn't feel like quietly watching pirated movies another night in a row to self soothe their economic precarity.