1. Background

In recent years, gradually more students with bachelor degrees of computer science and its related field would like to undertake postgraduate studies (e.g., MPhil and Ph.D.), especially for countries in Far East (e.g., China, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan). According to the news in Global Times, the number of postgraduate students (on campus) in China steadily increases in the twenty-first century, which has already reached 3.65 million in 2022 (see Fig. 1.1).

However, many students, including the ones who achieve high GPAs in undergraduate studies, are struggled with postgraduate studies. They may even leave the academia forever, leading to the loss of talents. The main reason for this kind of failure is that those students do not understand the differences between undergraduate studies and postgraduate studies. Therefore, they still adopt the previous (successful) mindsets in the undergraduate studies for the postgraduate studies, which can ultimately be failure.

During the undergraduate study, each student needs to take a lot of fundamental courses (e.g., C++ programming, data structures, design and analysis of algorithms, linear algebra, multivariate calculus, and probability and statistics). In order to be successful (i.e., get a high grade) in these courses, all they need to do is to (1) attend classes, (2) listen carefully in each class, (3) do a lot of exercises after each class, (4) submit assignments on time, (5) know the scope of each examination, and (6) prepare well for each examination. Note that these six steps are mainly used to consolidate their foundations, which are (of course) important. However, they are nothing related to the creativity issue. As an example, all problems (or exercises) are either provided by lecturers or obtained from textbooks, meaning that the students do not need to think of a new problem. As another example, solutions to these problems must be within the scopes of examinations (or textbooks). Therefore, the students can easily figure out the correct (and probably unique) solution to each problem.

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However, most of the above steps are no longer useful during the postgraduate study since we do not use the traditional examination to measure the research outcome. Instead, each student needs to find his/her own research problem, motivate the research problem (by telling a good story of it), figure out the solution for this problem, and write a research paper related to this problem in order to make it accepted in the prestigious conferences/journals. As such, there are many critical changes in this stage. First, those research problems may not be given (or clearly provided). The MPhil/Ph.D. supervisors sometimes may just have a rough direction (e.g., non-parametric density estimation models are very slow, which are worth for investigation.). Worse still, some supervisors (especially for those tenured professors who need to handle a lot of administrative issues from the universities, have various meetings every day, and become lazy) may not be on the front line of research and cannot provide clear directions. Therefore, the student needs to actively find the new research problem by himself/herself. Second, after the student finds the research problem, he/she cannot figure out one arbitrary solution (just like submitting an assignment to the lecturer). Instead, they need to develop a solution that can clearly advance the state of the art, which means this solution must be demonstrated to be better than the existing solutions in some aspects. Furthermore, these new solutions are unlikely to be bounded by the scopes from textbooks (or examinations). Third, the student needs to write an academic paper to present the problem and its motivation, the related studies, the new solution, the experimental results, and the conclusion in a logical way so that reviewers in top-tier conferences/journals can accept it. Note that many universities do not offer this kind of training in the undergraduate studies. Fourth, many students mainly rely on the lecturer for each course. For example, they may wait for the lecturer to provide the assignments for them to finish in order to get the high grade. However, the MPhil/Ph.D. supervisors may not be reliable (as mentioned above, they may have a lot of administrative issues). As such, the student needs to learn how to work independently.¹

With the above changes, many students may not be comfortable. Many of them do not know what to do next in the first year. Even worse, some students may get lost in the whole period of the postgraduate studies (e.g., zero publication in four years). In the worst situation, a few of them may even suffer from depression due to the zero progress of research. We believe that some of these students are really the talents and work extremely hard toward their research. However, they have nearly no progress because of their (initially) incorrect mindsets, which should be addressed in the very early stage. Therefore, in Chaps. 2 and 3, we first discuss common mistakes related to research attitudes and research actions, respectively, and point out the corresponding correct mindsets. Then, in Chaps. 4 and 5, we further discuss common mistakes regarding the reading and writing attitudes and presenting research papers, respectively, and the corresponding correct mindsets. Lastly, we discuss how to enhance the chance for making a paper accepted in a top-tier venue in Chap. 6.