Pretty amazing memoir. Does a nice job of capturing the ups and downs of the grad student experience. Phil - consider distilling this down as a blog post or two - lots of good lessons here, but given the length they might be lost on most or your potential readers.
hi matt - wow, i was gonna email you tomorrow, but HN scooped me.
re: distilling -- my main intention in writing this memoir wasn't to provide advice, since it's hard for me to determine how much facets of my experience generalize. i do have plans to convert the "lessons learned" section from the epilogue into a talk, though.
i have this other article from the beginning of my third year that's more of the "advice" type, although again, I'm wary of making generalizations about Ph.D. life:
http://pgbovine.net/PhD-life.htm
(other fun fact - i used one of your blog quotes as the title slide of my Ph.D. oral defense)
Turns out the author wrote about that problem, too [1].
The advice is mostly on how memorize names when you get introduced personally, but admittedly this is an even more important problem. Recommended read.
