A very practical one. First, learn how to code. Programming nowadays is as important and essential as knowing math and English if you want to be a quantitative scientist. So if I were to give a first-year student a practical advice it would be - master a programming language. It doesn’t matter which, and it doesn’t even matter if you will end up using that particular one in your future work. But having the ability to translate a logical problem into a set of operations that can become a routine operation is useful nowadays in nearly any aspect of the scientific inquiry.
Would you like to make a prediction about what neuroscientists will know about the human brain 10 years from now? And how may this knowledge be used - in both a good and bad ways?
There’s a quote I really like by von Neuman: “Predictions are very hard; especially about the future”… So I think it will be too risky an idea to do it. I do believe in this notion that Bill Gates coined once, that we overestimate how different the world will be in 10 years (thinking it will be full of spaceships, teleportation machines, and other science fiction ideas), but underestimate how different the world will be in 3 years…. As in, the next generation of mobile phones, computers or home-robotics, I imagine, will be a lot more remarkable than we imagine right now. So… I am betting on the little things we already know about the brain getting distilled to a level of understanding that will seem like a small step but would actually be remarkable in opening doors for behavior changes, control of our environment and ultimately a better understanding of ourselves!
