Rating: 
Summary: Handy book
Review: A handy book to read and to contemplate over. Provides many serious topics in the right amount of detail. Very easy read. Won't take very long.
Rating: 
Summary: Short and most are common sense if you're not deaf
Review: Easy, fun read, but Feibelman didn't provide any reasons to his opinions that you wouldn't think obvious or have heard of before. There also are NO statistical data to give weight to Feibelman's wisdom. I don't recommend this book if you are serious about your future academic career, but if you are looking for a very easy read of stuff you probably know already then by all means buy the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Little book packed with good info!
Review: Feibelman has done a great service for future scientists in writing this book. Although a quick read, it's dense with good advice for budding scientists, whether they be at the grad student, postdoc, or assistant professor stage of their careers. For example, he advises against showing an outline at the beginning of a talk because it is as superfluous as it is ubiquitous. (See the review by Gregory McMahan for more specifics.)The only shortcoming I find with the book is its focus on high level research. As a top scientist at a government lab, Feibelman directs his comments to those whose aspirations are similar to his. Not all of us who do research aspire to, or can, be tops in our field however. If you're looking for a book that tells you how to balance teaching and research or how to survive in different types of academic institutions, for example, a better choice would be Tomorrow's Professor by Richard Reis. Feibelman focuses only on the research side of the coin however. Still, the book is excellent and can be useful to anyone whose career includes scientific research. I only wish I had found it earlier!
Rating:
Summary: A book worths its weight in gold!
Review: Just as the title said, a PhD is not enough! Getting a PhD is just the beginning of a scientific career. There are many important "life" skills to learn. This book is unique in that it tells you what you need to do after you have your PhD. Another very precious thing that this book reveals is that going directly to academia after your PhD is probably not the best way to establish yourself as a scientist. There are too many duties (teaching, handling the students, departmental meetings, etc) that demand your time that you won't enough time to do the main tasks - bring in a grant, reseach and publish. A better way is to go to an industrial or govermental lab and establish your scientific reputation there. You won't have the distractions and can concentrate on getting grant, research and publish. After you are established, you can go to academia easily, if you so choose. Finally, the author reveals another big secret - pursue your long term research goal by a sequence of small projects. This book is an excellent and indispensible guide for budding scientists. Get this book if you are serious about becoming a scientist. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Obviously...
Review: Most of the pages in this brief book are devoted to statements of the obvious that anyone worthy of a Ph.D. should be able to discern on his or her own. There are some useful points on presentations and communication. The author points out the excessive burdens of being an assistant professor and suggests that the candidate establish a reputation in industry or government, then seek a (presumably tenured) academic post. Though I agree that one should avoid being an assistant professor at all costs, I cannot think of a single professor in my discipline (Organic Chemistry) who has obtained a tenured position without moving up through the assistant professor rank.
Rating:
Summary: It's a Required Reading for My BEST Graduate Students
Review: The insights in Feibelman's book are remarkable. Although it's been 12 years since receiving my Ph.D. from Palo Alto, I found myself taking notes (to avoid making some new mistakes). Though written somewhat for the hard sciences, I found everything had an analogue in the social sciences. It is required reading for all of the graduate students in my Food and Brand Lab. Something that's also clever about the book is how the author characterizes the counterarguments to many of his ideas and observations. By acknowledging these sometimes misguided, sometimes cynical views, he adds a nice credibility flair to his perspective. It also keeps people reading instead of saying "Yeah, but..." I wish it had been written 10 years earlier.
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Summary: A Big Little Book
Review: This book should be standard issue to graduate students (and any PhD who did not get it graduate school). It's a reminder that sheer brain power alone is not sufficient to be a successful scientist. It's also important to have a research plan and be able to articulate that plan. Indeed, the central theme of the book is the importance of communication at levels of a science career (talks, papers, grants, interviews, etc.). His guidelines for paper writing and giving talks are especially fine. Feibelman is a solid state physicist, but nearly everything he says was equally applicable to my field (astronomy). I didn't give this excellent book five stars because it is such a short book, and short on concrete detail and example. If you're serious about the issues discussed in the book, you'll want to pick up one or more related books out there (which often cite this one positively, by the way). Don't skip this one, though. You can read it in a hour or two every few years as a reminder/checklist about what you should be doing.
Rating:
Summary: good book with pros and cons.
Review: This book was my first book of this kind. And I was wondering about what's in the book before I bought it. I am a Ph.D. candidate who plan to graduate less than a year. Fortunately, my environment is good regarding the future planing after Ph.D.
To me, most of ideas on the book were familiar concepts, my insitution, mentor, my thesis committee members, postdocs in my department are open to discuss about the issues described in the book. But! Still it was good to read through it and think about them again. I got some good points of view, and also I disagree with some apects of this book. I wish I could find more recent books that is concise and easy-to-read like this one. I have not found any comparable and inexpensive book yet.
Rating:
Summary: Obviously...
Review: This is a great book for absolutely anyone working on his/her PhD or looking for career advice at the end of their PhD. In fact, it will be a great help even to those who are long finished with their PhD's especially if they are currently advising their own students.
The writing style is very friendly and straightforward, as if the author is talking to you, sitting across from you. More importantly, the advise is very practical and comes from someone who has a lot of experience in academia.
Rating:
Summary: An entertaining read with superb advice
Review: This is a succinct, pleasurable read that will help academics in the sciences pick an advisor, choose a research project, give excellent presentations, land a post-doc position, decide whether to go into industry or academia, and eventually get tenure. Wow!
Feibelman packs a career's-worth of tips and tactics in his slim volume and makes it entertaining at the same time. Feibelman's suggestion that all research should tell a compelling story. This is advice that any academic -- even those in the humanities and social sciences - would be wise to follow. I am a professional counselor and coach to academics and this is the first book I advise for grad students and junior faculty in the hard sciences -- especially those who work in labs.
My professor husband is a microbiologist and epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, and after reading the first section of the first chapter of this book, I ran to my husband and insisted that he buy a copy for every student who comes near his lab. My one complaint (and it is significant) is that Feiblelman is sexist. He presents 6 vignettes in the beginning of his book about career mistakes made by academics. Five of the stories are about men who make tactical career errors. One story is about a woman -- her mistakes are personal, psychological difficulties -- she tries too hard to please her father and ends up becoming a workaholic who doesn't have time to bear children.
Men are allocated work difficulties while the sole woman's problems are emotional in nature. I find this to be an inexcusible example of stereotyping from an otherwise saavy and helpful sage. Shame on you, Feibelman.
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