Advice for Research Students Who Aspire to Become Scientists

Written in Arabic. Below is an English summary — read the full article in Arabic ←.

Addressed "exclusively to honest research students" who aspire to become scientists of standing — not merely to collect a degree — this is a fifteen-point distillation of forty years of research and supervision.

The advice is unsparing and specific: study your prospective supervisor's own publications and avoid one without serious, current research; frame your project as questions and chase the literature until you reach a question nobody has answered; refuse stale topics whose sources are more than a decade old. Build the skills that last a career — time management, how to read, review and write a paper, how to generate ideas, how to manage information.

It ends with his own model of supervision: push hard until the student has thought about the problem more deeply than the supervisor — then discuss as peers, with the student as the expert on their own sub-problem.