🚀 Getting Started as a CS Graduate Student

“The first semester is about orientation. The second is about direction. The third is when real research begins.”

Whether you are beginning a Master’s or a PhD program, the first few months are foundational. The decisions you make in this window — which lab to join, which tools to learn, which habits to build — echo throughout your entire graduate career. This guide gives you a structured checklist and rational framework for navigating that critical onboarding period.

1. Week-by-Week Onboarding Plan

Week 1–2: Administrative Foundation

  • Set up your institutional email and enable two-factor authentication.
  • Register for university VPN access — you will need it for remote database and library access.
  • Claim your student benefits (see stack/academic-perks.md).
  • Activate your GitHub Student Developer Pack.
  • Set up your university library proxy in your browser for free journal/paper access.
  • Introduce yourself to lab members and administrative staff.
  • Locate the department’s graduate student handbook and read it in full.

Week 3–4: Environment Setup

  • Install and configure your core development environment.
  • Set up a password manager (Bitwarden — free; 1Password — free with GitHub Education Pack).
  • Configure your reference manager (Zotero recommended — see stack/literature-tools.md).
  • Create your Google Scholar profile and add your institution.
  • Set up a personal research website (GitHub Pages is free and sufficient).
  • Begin your first literature review using Semantic Scholar and Connected Papers.

Month 2–3: Research Direction

  • Schedule one-on-ones with each faculty member in your area of interest.
  • Attend all department seminars and colloquia — even the unrelated ones.
  • Read the five most-cited papers in your prospective research area.
  • Identify 2–3 potential research problems you find genuinely exciting.
  • Present your problem understanding to your prospective advisor for feedback.

2. Setting Up Your Development Environment

A reproducible, portable development environment prevents the most common class of research failures: “It worked on my machine.”

Layer Tool Purpose
Containerization Docker + NVIDIA Container Toolkit Reproducible ML environments
Package Management Conda (Miniforge) or uv (Python) Isolated Python environments
Version Control Git + GitHub Code, paper drafts, experiment configs
Remote Dev VS Code Remote SSH / JetBrains Gateway HPC cluster development
Experiment Tracking Weights & Biases (W&B) or MLflow Logging runs, metrics, artifacts
Reference Management Zotero + Better BibTeX Citation management for LaTeX

Initial Machine Setup Script (Ubuntu/Debian)

# System essentials
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y git curl wget htop tmux nvtop build-essential

# Miniforge (conda replacement, faster)
wget https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash Miniforge3-Linux-x86_64.sh

# Set up Git identity
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your@email.com"
git config --global core.editor "code --wait"

# Generate SSH key for GitHub
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your@email.com"
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub  # Copy this to GitHub Settings → SSH Keys

[!TIP] Store your dotfiles (.bashrc, .tmux.conf, .gitconfig) in a private GitHub repository. When you get a new machine or HPC allocation, a single git clone restores your entire environment.

3. Establishing Your Reading Habit

The most important skill in graduate school is the ability to read, comprehend, and synthesize research papers efficiently.

The 10-Paper Rule

In your first month, read 10 foundational papers in your area cover-to-cover. Not skimming — reading, annotating, summarizing. This builds the conceptual vocabulary you need to understand everything else.

To find these 10 papers:

  1. Ask your advisor: “What are the 5 papers I absolutely must read to work in this lab?”
  2. Search your prospective topic on Semantic Scholar, sort by Most Cited, read the top results.
  3. Use Connected Papers on the most cited paper to find the foundational cluster.

See guides/03-reading-papers.md for a structured paper reading methodology.

4. Building Your Academic Digital Presence

Your online research presence is your professional reputation made visible. Build it early.

Essential Profiles

  • Google Scholar — Create a public profile immediately. This is the canonical source for your citation count and h-index.
  • ORCID — Create a persistent researcher identifier. Required by many journals and grants. Free and takes 2 minutes.
  • Semantic Scholar — Claim your author profile to get citation alerts.
  • GitHub — Your public portfolio. Pin your best repositories.
  • Personal Website — Even a simple GitHub Pages site with your name, institution, research interests, and publications list is sufficient.

Website Generators for Researchers

Tool Complexity Best For
Academic Pages Low (GitHub Pages template) Fast setup, minimal customization
al-folio Medium (Jekyll) Clean, popular in ML/AI community
Hugo Academic Medium (Hugo) Fast builds, excellent publication support
Quarto Medium Integrates code, papers, and blog posts

5. Financial Survival

Graduate stipends are notoriously low. Optimizing your finances is a real research-enabler.

Academic Discounts and Free Resources

  • Software: Claim everything in stack/academic-perks.md immediately.
  • Textbooks: Library Genesis, Z-Library, Anna’s Archive — all major academic texts for free.
  • Journals: Use your library VPN or Unpaywall browser extension for legal open-access PDF retrieval.
  • Conference Travel: Apply for student travel grants from IEEE, ACM, and the organizing conference. Always ask your advisor first — labs often have travel funds.
  • Tax: In many countries, PhD stipends have special tax treatment. Consult your country-specific academic payroll office early.

6. Finding Your Research Community

Graduate school is not a solo endeavor. Your community is a research accelerant.

Where CS Researchers Gather

Platform Purpose
Twitter/X Real-time paper discussions, researcher networking
LinkedIn Professional networking, internship connections
Research Gate Author profiles, paper requests
Reddit r/MachineLearning ML community news and paper discussions
Discord servers ML Collective, Eleuther AI, Papers with Code
Local Meetups Department seminars, reading groups, local ACM/IEEE chapters

Further Reading