Resources and advise for KTH students

This page is meant as a guide and quickstart for students at KTH. Emphasis on the word guide; critical thinking is your friend in every aspect in life. Never, never, never confuse well-meaning advise with the truth.

Getting started

No matter what type of pressure you're put under to deliver a product for a company, good grades for your mom, money for your family etc., what you have to produce here is science. That can be interpreted to mean two things: your work needs to be interesting and falsifiable.

1. Interesting work means that you are not solving a problem that has already been solved. This is actually not trivial. How would you know what is interesting? What, exactly, are interesting questions? Well, unfortunately, no one knows. This a large part of why science is hard. Your best bet, I think, is to go where your common sense takes you: think about what you've already learned (which is a lot) and ask the necessary questions.

2. Falsifiability is a tremendously important part of any science. If you do not know what it is, please read this Wikipedia article now. I'll give you one good and one bad example of science. Can you guess which one is which? One example is trivially impossible to test (with current) technology. The other is a concrete and testable statement that you can measure. The answer may be no. But with enough work, you can build on the present state of science to offer an answer.

   1. Hypothesis: Global warming is the will of god.
   2. Hypothesis: Global warming is caused by rising levels of $CO_2$

Writing

Writing is an important discipline and skill you need to acquire. Writing will help you not just convey your ideas to the examiner, but is a crucial tool for thinking. And as you know, it takes a serious amount of time to develop a skill, so start early and practice often.

KTH offers help with academic writing. I strongly suggest you take at least one of their courses. https://www.kth.se/en/biblioteket