Personal Skills Center

• Communication (both oral and written)
• Cultural Topics and Interpersonal Skills
• Listening
• Personal Networking
• Time Management

• How To (a department of High Technology Careers Magazine) covers Managing Your Time and Your Life, When To Delegate Upward, Perfect Your Leadership Skills, The Art of Decision Making and more.
• All-But-Dissertation Survival Guide is a free monthly e-mail newsletter that aims to help doctoral students "overcome the inevitable obstacles you'll face along the dissertation marathon". One past issue is "Excuses Are Us". Other past issues can be found here.

Communication Skills Quiz

Dictionaries and Related Sources of Language

• Elements of Style, by W. Strunk, Jr.: a classic book about writing style. The entire book can be read in about an hour.
• OneLook Dictionaries: a search engine for words with which you can choose to search for the definition or translation of a word, even if you don't know how to spell it exactly. It searches in any or all of about 700 dictionaries.
• RPI's list of Online Dictionaries and Other Tools. This has a few more dictionaries, thesauri and other language sources.
• Hypertext Webster Interface: a simple word lookup with the option to do approximate search. It also includes a thesaurus, which could have your word even if the dictionary does not.
• Wayne Magnuson: English Idioms: an online idiom dictionary that can search in multiple ways.

• University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center features an extensive, well-organized, searchable collection of academic writing handouts.
• Writing place at Northwestern provides a collection of useful links foreach stage of writing process.
• RPI Writing Center. This is an extensive list of online writing centers and other resources, produced by Rensselaer's Department of Language, Literature, and Communication.
• University of Illinois Writing Center
• Writing Center from St. Cloud State University and Literacy Education Online.
• General Communication skills page from Iowa State University.
• Walden University Writing Center. This has useful links plus its own material. See especially Top 10 APA Trouble Spots by its editor.

• A course on Advanced Technical Communication See the two links near the end: one is "Wordiness" and the other is "Simplifying your Prose".
• Collected advice on research and writing from Mark Leone. This has a useful list of links in writing and publishing reports or theses, how to give a good talk, and more.
• Grammar and Style Notes from Jack Lynch. This is an extensive guide with some search capability. Some examples are: when to use affect versus effect, how to use metaphors and avoid mixing them, and why passive voice is overused.
• Readability Counts. This short but important message from the Operations Research Review Committee appeared in OR/MS Today.
• Tips for Oral Presentation from Harvey Greenberg. This was written originally for the Senior Seminar, but it serves as a general guide for giving a presentation.
• Writing Proofs from Lesie Lamport The author of the original LaTeX manual offers advice on writing proofs, both from the standpoint of being less prone to certain errors and clarity of presentation.

• SIAM

  • A Good Speaker Is Made, Not Born. This is a short pep talk on speaking. One of its best pieces of advice is that you should observe other talks with an ear for what you like about them (you can also note what you dislike). This is a good way to learn about writing style as well as speaking.
  • How to Prepare a Poster. Although this is particular to the "poster" format in a SIAM meeting, the advice applies more generally.

• Cooperative Communiction Skills: features a library of articles and a free, downloadable Seven Challenges Workbook that helps to improve your communication abilities in personal as well as work situations.
• Resources for Science and Technical Writers: provides a list of search engines, classic readings, professional associations, software & technical support, and design tools.

• Interpersonal skill development from MSU counseling center
• Multicultural Resources from Golden Gate University
• Barbarian's Online Test Page. Learning more about yourself can open the way to improved interpersonal skills. This site points to lots of self-administered tests, ranging from IQ to emotional anxieties.

• Effective Listening Skills by Kenneth R. Johnson, a short article.
• Improving someone's listening skills, by Herbert Greenberg and Jay J. Avelino
• Listening Questionnaire is a interactive quiz for you to assess your ability to listen actively.
• International Listening Association. This professional organization offers many links.
• Effective Listening Skills, a short article with many insights.

The definitive explanation of why and how to network professionally is "Networking on the Network" by Prof. Phil Agre. The scope is actually somewhat broader, and it includes much excellent career advice. This should be required reading for every grad student and young professional.

Here are some gateways to people who may share some of your professional interests.

• INFORMS Student Chapters, a list of INFORMS student chapters.
• JobSmart's Hidden Job Market , an introduction to personal networking with a view to job search.
• OR/MS Student Mailing List, a moderated mailing list of OR/MS students.
• Young Mathematicians Network, a loose organization of junior mathematicians, some of whom are interested in the mathematical elements of OR/MS. They publish a newsletter, Concerns of Young Mathematicians, with articles online till 1996.

• Time Management Tips, a short article prepared by a self-development center in George Mason University.
• Day-Timer Resource Library , one of the best collections of articles on time management on the web.
• Time Management Skills, from MindTools. A serious manual on efficient time management.