Here is a small collection of useful resources and advice.

Anonymous Github is a tool for anonymizing a github repository, useful for double-blind review of any paper that relies on a software implementation.

URI Dissertation Template is a LaTeX template for doctoral dissertations in "manuscript" style (each paper becomes a chapter with its own reference section). I did not write this but am providing it as a github repository.

The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D by Matt Might (a professor at the University of Utah) should be required reading for anyone contemplating graduate school.

My friend and colleague Norman Ramsey has some wonderful resources on writing, how to give a talk, and how to get into a Ph.D program.

Advice on writing posters

The most valuable real-estate on a poster, other than the big title at the top, comprises the headings of each section. Most poster authors squander this real estate with the same section headings they’d rightly use in a paper: Introduction, Background, Methods, Results, Discussion. Instead, use these section headings to give the “elevator pitch” of your poster. For instance, instead of “Methods”, try “We apply XYZ algorithm to these datasets”. Instead of “Results,” try a half-sentence summary.