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If you read things at face value and don't wise up to the hidden meanings in paper-speak, you might get left behind.

"You want your student to be able to turn the handle and watch at least some decent results slowly emerge."

"The U.S. approach to intellectual property rights is foreign to many Japanese scientists. But ignoring it could mean jail."

"I've decided to break all the rules. I'm tackling the whole thing in one go."

"I think I have been lucky in the choice of topics to work on, topics which later turned out to be useful for developments in an apparently different direction."

Editor's note: MiSciNet's "Dear MentorDoctor" will appear every other month and is designed to help mentors and students with situations that commonly arise in academia. Do you have questions for MiSciNet's MentorDoctor team? Please send inquiries to
rarnette@aaas.org.

Sometimes an adviser can be a little
too attentive.

Mentoring is an art that requires skills and attitude that are in short supply in this case.

"I produce 10 data points that completely undermine what everybody thinks they know about the archaeological record here. It was really important and really interesting, and almost nobody believed me." -Joan Brenner Coltrain

María Pascual has influenced European policy from her perch in regulatory affairs at an adult stem cell drug development company in Spain.

"At first, I didn’t tell anyone. I faked the funk. I didn’t want their pity. I didn’t want them saying, 'well I’m so sorry,' while thinking, 'glad it wasn’t me.'"

An excellent doctoral education should not be left to chance.

"Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." --Dwight Eisenhower

The global financial crisis has beaten down science budgets everywhere. So it's no surprise that science-spending forecasts for Europe are grim.