I didn't set out to become a research mentor. It happened because people kept asking me the same question after conference talks and lab meetings: how did you know this was worth doing? I noticed that the students who got stuck weren't missing effort or intelligence. They were missing a way of reading their own work the way a reviewer would.

I've published 34 papers, sat through hundreds of reviews of my own, and reviewed papers for other researchers well over a hundred times. I've seen both sides of the process enough to know where most submissions actually fall apart, and it's rarely where people think. This course is my attempt to hand over that pattern recognition directly, instead of making you spend years discovering it the hard way.