I came across some good pieces of advice for PhD students that I feel urged to share. They are for graduate students in economics but since finance students share similar coursework in the first year, so I think the advice applies.

  1. First-year general advice: Mastering Year One by Alex Zentefis. He also shares a book list for graduate school in economics or finance.

  2. Data Management and Coding: Code and Data for the Social Sciences: A Practitioner’s Guide by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro. This is a good guide for empiricists.

    • Sources to start learning Git, GitHub, and connecting them with your preferred programming languages: R language; Julia language. I strongly recommend to learn at least one version control system (git in this case). It will improve your workflow significantly.
    • A good text editor to focus on writing codes: Sublime Text; Send Sublime Text codes to R
    • If you don’t want to save time wrestling with installing the programming languages, their IDEs (e.g. RStudio for R, Spyder for Python), their basic packages and unexpected issues, I strongly recommend Anaconda. It is a platform to work on coding with your chosen programming languages (Python/R/Julia or all).