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Answer by Jay Wacker:

Expect writing to be a lot harder than you imagine.  What no one tells you when you’re a young and upcoming scientist is that communication is 90% of the job of being a professional scientist.

What this means is that you should take your writing, and also your speaking, as a core part of your profession, not some auxiliary aspect to your job as a scientist.   Ed Witten is amazing for his technical achievements, but as you get more experience with writing, you’ll be flabbergasted by his [writing] ability….  The ability to write amazingly well is a distinguishing characteristic amongst many of the greatest high energy theorists such as Steven Weinberg, Lenny Susskind, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Juan Maldacena, Savas Dimopoulos, and so on and so forth.

This need for good communication skills is a problem for many young scientists, because frequently there was this false dichotomy between being “science & math”-y versus “english & art”-y.  Oftentimes language skills are simply not developed very thoroughly in students with strong science and math aptitudes during secondary school and university.  Oftentimes I found that my graduate students were having to focus on communication for the first time halfway through graduate school.  This is even more true for speaking ability where most people have never taken a class in speech, debate, etc.  

Just to drive home the importance of this, I’ve been told of studies of success amongst physics graduate students is better determined by the verbal GRE than the physics GRE.   

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