Highest Goal

Publish something that other people find so useful that they start doing it themselves.

Purchasing Equipment and Supplies 

In general: Buy it!

Many graduate students have a hard time adjusting to the idea of spending thousands of dollars on equipment that they may only need for one measurement.  The reality is that equipment is one of the most important assets that a lab can have.  The more stuff we've got lying around, the more likely we can do experiments the right way, and do them quickly.

So buy it!

 

From a bean-counting point of view, if you spend a few thousand dollars each month buying equipment that doubles your productivity or rate of progress, it's a big win.  Worse, students often waste months or even years of their graduate careers making lousy measurements with lousy equipment. If the students waste their time with lousy equipment, everyone loses.

So buy it!

Discuss with advisor often (and very often)

Students are the most important asset to their advisor. To help students solving their problems is the advisor's priority . Do not be afraid to discuss with the advisor.

Stop by his office and knock the door anytime.

 

Collaboration, sharing ideas, etc.

Talk about your ideas.  Help your colleagues work out their problems. Pay attention to what other people are doing, and see if you can learn something, or if you can contribute.

 

Other than the mundane goal of getting your PhD ;), you are in graduate school to push forward the frontiers of knowledge.  You do this by generating and exploring new ideas.  There is no way that you will ever be able to explore all of the ideas that you generate, but some of those ideas that you discard might be just what some of your colleagues are looking for.

 

You will find people in academia who give in to the dark side. They never discuss what they are working on, except in vague and deceptive terms.  They are experts at finding fault with the work of their colleagues.  They writes papers that make very grand claims, but you can never quite figure out what they've accomplished and what they haven't.  They omit the key detail of the design or process that would enable others to follow his work. They are lost in the fundamental goal of discovery and publications.

 

Be open about what you are working on.  Be honest about what you've done, and even more honest about what you haven't.  Don't ever hide an idea for fear that someone will steal it.  With patience, you will succeed.

 

Reputation

Most academic communities are pretty small, and the people on top usually have pretty good memories.  As a result, your reputation is extremely important to your success.

Things to avoid:

 - promising more in the abstract than you deliver in the paper

 - misleading or vague results, descriptions, etc.

 

Note that your reputation is intimately tied with the reputation of your advisor, your colleagues in your group, the program, and to some extent of R.I.T. as a whole.  On the plus side, you get a huge dose of reputation (most of it good) just by being at R.I.T.  On the down side, if you screw up you put a little tarnish on the reputation of everyone you work with.