This page contains resources for aspiring physicists, particularly for those who are interested in working as research assistants for the first time. To be a productive particle physics researcher, there are a number of skills you should try to learn that go beyond your knowledge of physics itself.

Computing and software

• Working from the command line interface
  • Basic Unix commands from unixtutorial.org
  • Linux terminal introduction
• Command-line text editors:
  • emacs
    • Absolute beginner’s guide (GUI)
  • vi / vim
    • ‘Basics of vi in under 8 minutes’ (video)
    • vim adventures (learn vim by playing a game!)
• git
• Parallel / batch computing: condor, slurm

Communicating results

• It’s helpful to understand the best ways to communicate using data. This can be different, depending on the dataset and what aspects of it you’re hoping to convey. A good starting place for this is the classic: E. Tufte, ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’ – I have a copy in my office you can borrow.

• An interesting article about planning and giving mathematics lectures, containing good lessons also for certain kinds of conference talks, seminars, etc.: P. R. Halmos, How to talk Mathematics.