作者介绍“11条军规”背景：
Some modest advice

Mostly on the basis of the introduction to my PhD proposal, I was nominated for and got a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley, where we arrived in June of 1975 and spent the next three years. The Friday before the first week of spring quarter in 1976 I was asked by a rather patriarchal, authoritarian senior professor to give the first session of the graduate seminar for which he was responsible. I recalled gratefully the freedom, the informality, and the support I had at UBC, and I was finding Berkeley to be more formal, more pompous, more full of itself, and a place that had created more hurdles for graduate students to jump. Feeling a bit mischievous, I agreed to do it on the condition that I could talk about whatever I wanted, which was graduate education, and to his credit he agreed. After a discussion with my fellow postdoc, Ray Huey, I sat down and wrote Some modest advice for graduate students in about two hours. Ray added to it, and on Monday I presented it to the graduate students and professors in that seminar, adding a dash of theatre by acting like a busy professor, looking at my watch, and leaving in a rush without taking any questions. The performance created a minor local sensation. The text of the talk was copied and circulated widely, mostly within North America, for 10 years. I was then asked to publish it, which I did, with Ray’s reply, in 1987 (Stearns and Huey, 1987). It became our most read and least cited piece of writing; you see both at http://faculty.washington.edu/hueyrb/prospective.php(link is external) and (as of June 2008) on roughly 85 other web sites located on at least three continents.

My first stab at thinking about the concrete practice of education, Modest advice puts great emphasis on the psychological state of the student: its core message is self-reliance. Over the years I have received numerous emails from graduate students I had never met thanking me for havi ...

My first stab at thinking about the concrete practice of education, Modest advice puts great emphasis on the psychological state of the student: its core message is self-reliance. Over the years I have received numerous emails from graduate students I had never met thanking me for having written it, often mentioning that they wished they had read it sooner. Its subtitles signal its message:
•Always Prepare for the Worst.
•Nobody cares about you.
•You Must Know Why Your Work is Important.
•Psychological Problems are the Biggest Barrier.
•Avoid Taking Lectures - They’re Usually Inefficient.
•Write a Proposal and Get It Criticized.
•Manage Your Advisors.
•Types of Theses.
•Start Publishing Early.
•Don’t Look Down on a Master’s Thesis.
•Publish Regularly, But Not Too Much.

回复@刘立：Thirty-two years on, I would like to add a bit to a piece that has, on the whole, worn well. The model for graduate work expressed in Modest advice is not for everyone. When I got my first two PhD students in Basel, Switzerland, in 1984, I treated them as I thought I would want to be treated: I gave them Modest advice to read, and I asked them to come up with their own projects. One of them took to it like a duck to water, enjoyed it, and flourished in science: he is now a full professor at a major research university. The other came up with a great idea that suggested a pilot project involving a trip to a field site in Africa. I bought him a ticket and asked him to go down and do a feasibility study. On the last day we could get the money back for the ticket, he came into my office, handed me the ticket, and told me he would not make the trip because he could not bear the risk of failure. He then had a nervous breakdown, and when he emerged from treatment and returned to work, his personality had changed. He had become, as I perceived him, paranoid and obsessive.

He asked me to give him a project for the PhD, which I did, and proceeded to execute it with almost fanatical energy, producing a body of work that will probably never be replicated because no one else would be willing to work so hard and so precisely. He got the PhD, published several good papers from it, did a postdoc, got a starting faculty position in a medical school, then dropped out of academia to take a government job that involved statistics, at which he had become expert. When I had occasion to ask him whether I could show his wonderful PhD proposal (the one whose risk of failure he could not bear) to another student, he reluctantly told me yes, but he made clear that he blamed me for ruining his life by confronting him with unbearable expectations. The proposal later vanished from my files, which were accessible to my students in a public space. At that considerable cost, I learned that each  ...

回复@刘立：来源：Designs for Learning https://stearnslab.yale.edu/designs-learning

反STEARNS ”11条军规“，见：REPLY TO STEARNS: SOME ACYNICAL ADVICE FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS http://faculty.washington.edu/hueyrb/pdfs/reply.pdf

回复@刘立：耶鲁和他实验室的链接都打不开...我想知道后面怎样了？ At that considerable cost, I learned that each...