I'll say grad students today often seem a bit sheepish and inarticulate. They're facing a very competitive market so I think it behooves the theorists to be able to talk about experiment a bit and vice versa. On the other hand they have a big hill to climb to just be successful with DFT.

One of my few regrets in grad school is that I didn't take a course in DFT, not like I was really going to use it, but DFT is an example of the kind of very complex calculation which takes a lot of care to apply. I got a little of this art from Sethna's class in renormalization groups and such but it was really

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Study-Stellar-Structure-...

by Chandrasekhar that taught me how to organize the kind of complex calculations that might involve numeric integration differential equations, using a computer, etc -- extracurricular for a cond-mat PhD but really a lot of fun.

I just made a breakthrough in selfobject technology (enough of a reformulation that I can take back the ideas that my evil twin published in such a way that I couldn't ever publish them under my name) and managed to get the evil out of my evil twin and I've been practicing "radiance drills" that get me into a state where I can really draw out 30y+ people but how it works with "kids these days" is an open question because since the pandemic grad students mostly seem like damp squibs -- I gotta give it a try.

I do regret I didn't figure this out much sooner (if I had I wouldn't have some things on my chart I do now) but right now I having so much fun I think other people should be jealous.