Another good thing about Pittsburgh is that it's easy to reach the New York or Washington metro areas when you want to enjoy some "big city" amenities like a Broadway show or a visit to the Smithsonian, but far enough away that the cost of living is ridiculously cheap. Grad students buy houses here. And Pittsburgh has had a TechShop for years. Also, the local government is actually supportive of Uber, which might explain why Uber built their Advanced Technology Center here for self-driving car research.

Boycott ResearchGate: they're spammers. If you enter your papers into ResearchGate they will spam all your co-authors and FORGE YOUR NAME as the sender of the spam. Every time I've informed a colleague that "they" have spammed me, they've been horrified and unsubscribed from ResearchGate. It's no surprise that such an unethical company brags about Bill Gates being one of their investors.

I teach a graduate course in computational neuroscience at CMU. My lecture notes, exercises, and Matlab software are all available online via my home page, at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst

I disagree with the notion that only professionals should speak publicly about their scientific work. Amateurs should be welcome in any branch of science. Who knows where the next contribution will come from? And there is plenty of disappointing work from tenured professionals. So read the journals, but be prepared to wade through a lot of straw to find the gold. One of the advantages of graduate school is that there are experts who can help you with this.