I wish I had known this advice when I was Graduating my Masters in Computer Science. This is an excellent writeup and priceless advice from Murat Demirbas who is a computer science and engineering professor at SUNY Buffalo.

His advice to you has 4 parts: Publish or perish, Work hard, Understand the philosophy of research, and Manage your time well. I found this article explains all of these 4 parts very succinctly and conveys the ideas brilliantly.

Read the full article My Advice To My Graduate Students at: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/04/my-advice-to-my-students.html

Although every advice given in the above article is excellent, I find the following to be extremely important:

Success = time * focus. Time Focused time is very precious.