At least in the United States many students are taught very early on (usually elementary school age) about the various types of “smart” there are. Usually these include things like:

  • Book Smart, where you are good at school
  • People Smart, where you are good with people
  • Street Smart, where you have lots of real world experience

However as I start my PhD I have come to realize that there is another type of intelligence: research smart. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have come up with this concept, but I think it combines being both book smart and people smart. Without being book smart, it is much harder to keep up with the current state of your field and have the fundamental understanding of the basics (so to speak, doing research relies on more than the basics). In terms of research, it rarely occurs in a vacuum (after all how many single author papers do we see). Wether in a student-advisor relationship, or multiple researchers (academic or industry) collaborating there is lots to navigate. First, you need to be able to stick to your guns when necessary, but flexible where necessary. There are a large number of question that come up when conducting research that many people don’t think of: how to pick a good topic, to both the authors and research community, There are also number of more logistic questions that often are not thought of: who to include as an author, what order do they go in, and an almost infinite number of grammatical or stylistic choices that people don’t realize they have a strong preference for.