Alexis Vega

All I want for grad student appreciation week is a 401(k) with matching @umich. Thanks for the cookies, bagels, and coffee. But give me compound interest and let me FIRE. #AcademicChatter #SciTwitter #phdlife

ADHD is: telling someone your brilliant idea then avoiding them for months because you haven't done it yet.

@sharenarice (🧠💭)🧠💭💭 Thinking about you thinking about thinking.

🧠💭💭 ^Am thinking about thinking, so my thought bubble has a thought bubble coming out of it! How meta can we go? #thinking #metacognition

"I can't _____ until I _____" is the #1 reason I struggle to get things done. Everything seems SO IMPORTANT in the moment. ...until it's the end of the day and I haven't finished anything on my to-do list. 🤷‍♀️ #ADHD #NeurodiverseSquad

I finished my PhD at 26. I regret this. Take time off between grad school and undergrad. Live your life. Defer, read, work, explore, party, save, make art, sleep. Don’t rush. Grad school is not the safety net you think it is. The degree will be there when you’re done. Enjoy life!

Some people create constant trouble to distract themselves from the deeper issues they are avoiding. They make sure there is always a new fire to put out. They are both fireman and arsonist.

The goal of teaching should not be to help the students learn how to memorize and spit out information under academic pressure. 🧠 The purpose of teaching is to inspire the desire for learning in them and make them able to think, understand, and question.

"Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows." -- Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976)

A "mentor" and an "advisor" are two very different things. My biggest advice to new grad students is to make sure the labs you are considering have a PI that actually cares about mentoring.

Still so shook that people aren’t more upset or appalled about recipients of the NSF GRFP being 80% white lol

2 underrated traits in the age of information: 1. Information offence - Relentlessly searching for high signal information. 2. Information defence - Relentlessly pruning bullshit from your life.

The most common cause of stress nowadays is dealing with idiots. 🧠

Doing a PhD is much more than getting the degree. You learn fundamental skills for your whole career: goal setting, time management and perseverance to name a few. Take a moment to reflect not only what you are doing but who you are becoming. #phdlife #ecrchat #AcademicChatter

RL Unplugged🔌: Offline RL benchmark that comes with both data and implementations of existing offline RL agents. It makes it easy to enter RL research and allows reproducibility.More agents in Acme will come soon. Github: git.io/JJUhd arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2006.13888

John Lewis has crossed over the final bridge. The last of the "Big Six" civil rights leaders is gone. If courage had a name, it was his, and he leaves us at a time when the stakes of all he struggled for could not be higher...

Josh Waitzkin is one of the the most underrated thinkers alive

Code switching is essential skill for #BIPOC and #LGTB people. Why is that? Here I discuss how code switching has negatively impacted me and my students. #BlackLivesMatter #BlackInSTEM #BlackInTheIvoryTower sciencemag.org/careers/2020/0…

Mentorship is not just about showing how to do science, but how to do it while being inclusive and respectful of others. Mentors should lead by examples so that mentees may learn the many ways to be generous, especially to junior colleagues. We all benefit by elevating others.

"We reveal a stratified system where underrepresented groups have to innovate at higher levels to have similar levels of career likelihoods." The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science pnas.org/content/117/17…