Learning from (Negative) Examples: Part II

To see the first post of the series, go here.

This week's observation of management failures:

When you hire an expert in ____, have them work on ____. For example, assume you hire someone who is a preeminent scientist in shock-wave physics. You have two projects with funding: one is on polymeric structures, and the other is on simulating ion impacts. Quick, which one do you have them work on?

*buzz* Time's up! If you said ion impacts, you are clearly not my advisor.

Keep it simple or explain it clearly: you may have great reasons for adding 10 layers of complexity to what is typically a very simple process (like, say, taking a group photo). However, don't expect an enthusiastic response when something that should take 5 minutes takes an hour if you don't make clear why. Even if you can't successfully communicate it, try.

Not everyone responds to the same motivation: My advisor is a big believer that we should all be motivated to work 16 hours a day so we can graduate sooner and go out into the world an make a reasonable amount of money. This, apparently, is all the motivation we should possibly need. I don't think he comprehends that short-term praise/feedback can make a huge difference in productivity. I don't think he understands how utterly disheartening broken equipment can be. Most students don't need cheerleaders, but most students do need some outside motivation.

A Brief PI Rant

Dear PI:

Communication is much more effective when it is a two-way street. You complain that we don't keep you informed about what we're doing, and that we need to show you more intermediate data. Well, how do you propose we do that? Emails are largely unread, Dropbox is doing diddly-squat and we meet once a month for 30 minutes during which you often get fixated on one detail of something trivial (like, say, my font choice on a purely internal document). Do you want daily telegrams? Smoke signals? Voicemail? I'm running out of ways to convey information to you. Finding you in person doesn't work, and since you are teaching a grad class this semester, you don't have set office hours I can use to ambush you.

Furthermore, quit getting mad that we don't always communicate with other group members about things we had no idea they were even doing. There are 2 postdocs and 7 graduate students and 2 undergrads working on 12 different projects. It's a good day when I remember everything I'm supposed to be working on, let alone what everyone else is doing.

We're not going to be offended that you have to travel for presentations and review panels and whatnot, but please, at least tell us when you aren't going to be around so we don't waste time looking for you?

Thanks,
The people you allegedly advise/supervise

Learning from (Negative) Examples

My advisor is a brilliant scientist, but he's not such a brilliant manager. So I'm trying to figure out what I can learn *not* to do from his example, in addition to all the things I'm learning to do as a graduate student.  Here are some of my initial thoughts:

1) Don't take more than 6 months to give any feedback on a paper. Students would rather get a paper with angry red ink demanding we re-write entire sections than wait while you polish the language.

2) Don't assume students know what they're supposed to be working on if you don't tell them directly. Corollary: don't assume students know about deadline just because they happened at the same time last year. A year ago is a much longer time to a graduate student than you, and we don't get emails reminding us of upcoming grant reviews unless *you* send them.

3) Announce when positive things happen. Land a grant? Announce it! A paper got accepted, even if the student graduated? Announce it! A big celebration isn't needed, but let us know.

4) When disasters happen, make time to meet with the affected students, or else they get really jittery.

5) If you're going to be super busy or traveling, let students know so they don't spend all day trying to hunt you down when you're out of town. We shouldn't be asking undergrads for copies of their syllabi to know when you have scheduled absences.

6) Never, ever submit conference abstracts with a student as a co-author (i.e, the person expected to generate the data) unless a)the data already exists or b) you warn the student that they need to produce this data *at the time of abstract submission* (not 4 weeks before the presentation...)

What have you learned by bad example?

Lone Ranger?

Having an undergraduate working with me has been a great experience so far. But it's made me think about how things work in my research group, or how they don't really work. Because he's working very closely on one of my projects, I have a very good idea of what his data should look like, and can help with troubleshooting. Much like in writing, sometimes, you just need someone else to spot your typos. Unfortunately, there's almost no overlap across projects in my group. There's no one who can take a glance at my simulations and spot a syntax error in my input file, or remember when they got the same error code. 

In theory, our advisor would be close enough to projects to help with these types of problems, but the reality is that most of us are left to fend for ourselves. You certainly learn more by struggling through to solve problems, but there's a point at which it overwhelms the ability to get anything done. It also makes brainstorming more limited. Collaborating is not something I'm learning how to do right now. 

I'm a little jealous of some of the other groups in my department, who work much more closely with one another. They seem to be less dependent on their advisors. On the other hand, when the equipment goes down, no one is getting any work done. Maybe the grass always looks greener from a distance. 

Turn-Based Advising

This semester is not getting off to a great start. I came into the office after break only to be immediately flattened by a fairly nasty head cold. I'm also really struggling with staying motivated. My prelims are done, and to be honest, I'm about fifth in line to graduate from my group, which means I'm also fairly far down in my advisor's reading stack. One of the older students and I were talking about it, and realized that my advisor more or less practices turn-based advising. So he won't read Student Y's paper because he's too busy with Student X's papers whose papers he didn't read until after they graduated because he was too busy with Student V's papers.

I'm also not working on a project with any collaborators, which is why I'm farther down the list than the two students who joined when I did. I sit next to the conference table in our office space, and it gets hard to ignore how differently he treats my project (i.e., ignores). It's hard not to get angry. Nothing has changed about his advising, but I no longer have the distraction of classes.

I'm sure that about 2 weeks before the next grant review rolls around (noting I'm not actually supported on it...), I'll get attention again. But right now, I can't help like feeling like a three-year-old tugging on a parental sleeve begging them to look at my pretty picture.

(Eleven) months of blogging

Joining in on the end-of-the-year meme, despite not having blogged for a full year yet...


January: Lurking, some commenting. 


February: After spending months reading, lurking, and periodically commenting on a number of blogs, I'm finally caving to the urge to create my own. 


March: You use a Gantt chart to help plan your wedding.


April: The next month isn't looking promising for advisorial feedback: his committee duties apparently require vast amount of reading, two (2) students are defending within the next month, the project funding roughly 1/3 of the group has an annual review, and he submitted a semi-speculative abstract months ago to a conference in May, and the student doing most of that work got stuck out of the country due to visa issues. (holy run-on sentence, Batman!)


May: At GiantU, there is a common complaint from undergraduate engineering majors that none of their classes cover some of the more practical things employers expect them to know, like Matlab coding. 


June: As mentioned in my wedding post, I mentioned Mr.ME and I are having a steampunk wedding. 


July: I should have the wedding picture post up soon, but there's some picture editing to be done first. 


August: Project A data frenzy is done, which means Project B data frenzy is now in full swing. 


September: The engineering school here at GiantU runs a training session for new TAs, and I have to say that I was surprised by how well done it was. 

October: So this is a topic that was mentioned on EngineerBlogs back in February, but in preparing for my first ever lecture, I've been very thankful for my rather extensive bookshelf. 


November: It has not been the most productive week of my life (other than knitting, which I learned this weekend). 


December: This semester has been my first real teaching experience, though by no means my first grading experience. 

So what have I learned? As soon as I get busy, my blogging drops to almost nothing, unless I'm super-stressed. I've learned that I'm not crazy, my advisor is, and that I really do love teaching, even when I find individual students frustrating. Now, to keep it going another 11 months...

Deceptive publication records

So several of us in my research group, frustrated with the what feel like is a complete lack of papers coming out of our group and our PI's snail-like pace in reading them decided to see how no one has gotten mad at him for not publishing more (admittedly, he's tenured and has been for awhile, but GiantU doesn't tend to be a school for resting on one's laurels). The answer seems to be as a very minor collaborator on projects none of us were even remotely aware of. Collaboration can be a fantastic thing, but in this case, it really seems to be at the detriment of his own students. Only 1/3rd of the papers he's published since coming to GiantU from OtherGiantU have one or more of his graduate students on them. So overall, his numbers look fine (though not spectacular), but we aren't getting the papers.

I see a lot of people giving graduate students advice about selecting advisors reminding them to check publication records. However, just looking at how frequently the PI has published can be deceptive. Check the other authors: are they even at the same institution? Even better, check the student's publication records. While some fields may typically not publish before graduation, almost every department website I've looked at is out of date, so some of those students may have already graduated.

Also, a question I asked on Twitter earlier: in your group, are things like papers and grants announced? This blog was triggered by me finding a recently published paper where my advisor was a collaborator and one of the students who has since left the group was also a coauthor. I had no idea this paper existed until it popped up in my search. My PI recently was awarded an experimental grant, which we only discovered because we brought in a new student to work on a brand-new project and there was a sudden equipment buying binge.

Am I just being paranoid, or is this all totally normal practice in science?

Where has all the motivation gone?

So I was at a conference all of last week, which was simultaneously inspiring and disheartening. I came out of talks with all sorts of ideas of things that I could do. On the other hand, I kept thinking about how impractical and uninteresting what I've gotten done in that last year has been. This has been a frustrating year, to say the least. I've been project-hijacked by my advisor several times to produce data for abstracts he submitted without existing data, or based on data he expected from students who ended up leaving the group. Because of a possible scheduling conflict, I had to submit a poster to a conference in case he couldn't be there to give his talk.  I've been trying to cut back on the whining, but after last week, I'm just tired. My work didn't belong at that conference, but my advisor told everyone to submit abstracts so that he could answer "yes" at committee meetings when asked if he had any students at the meeting.

I also got to meet with his perpetual golden child who really is a very lovely person, and provides some hope that maybe I can be successful in spite of my PI. She also reassures me that nagging him really is my only route to get papers read. On the other hand, it's been ONE YEAR since I sent the first complete draft of my first manuscript to him, and the total feedback I've gotten was "Well, sometimes your writing is a bit choppy". This is not due to a lack of nagging...

It's also a bit depressing to meet friends who have completed their Master's programs and are out in industry, with responsibilities and interesting jobs.

So now, I'm back, with no real looming deadlines, and it's hard to motivate myself to do anything right now. Suggestions?

Away from my desk

This week has been a definite anomaly, in that I've spent more time in a lab than at a desk. Being that I'm a computationalist, generally speaking, my desk *is* my lab. However, I'm TAing the junior level lab course for the department, and between the lab this week and training and prep for next week, I've mostly been in the lab getting nice and gritty.

The students this week get to see casting up close and personal, generally for the first time. Last week, they carved foam parts, which we mounts to runners at the foundry before making a sand mold. This method is called "lost foam" (though more generally it's lost wax, but we're using foam...), and you actually leave the pattern in the sand. Then, when you pour the metal, it burns up.

I'd forgotten how much I loved poking around the machine shop, but more than that, I'd forgotten how jazzed I get when I'm teaching. As the TA with the most prior casting experience, and with the professor out of town, I've taken point for this lab (though my first formal lecture isn't for another two weeks). I find teaching super-energizing, to the point where Mr.ME gets annoyed with how bouncy I am when I get home.

Because GiantU, unlike SnowTech, does not have an on-site foundry, we had to drive to the site, which was a fun chance to talk to students in a less formal setting. I also took the chance to ask them about how my advisor is as a teacher (answer: much better than he is as an advisor). He's even teaching one of the harder courses in the curriculum, so it's all the more impressive. Of course, it's still before the first exam, so they may yet change their minds.

The Transition to Candidacy

Passing my prelims was fantastic, in that I felt like I was actually *done* with something. Except for the part where I really am not done with anything: I'm just starting.

For me, the first two years of graduate schools have been like a series of mad dashes from one deadline to the next. The coursework race, the (insert conference here) scrambles, the speculative abstract panics. There was always another major deadline looming. This week, for the first time, my advisor and I had a discussion about what I should be working on (!) to generate papers (that maybe he'll read?) and make progress, without any specific deadlines!

I hadn't realized to what an extent my life has been ruled by specific deadlines until suddenly, it's not. Yes, I have two conferences this fall, but I already have most of the data, because I was actually involved in writing and submitting the abstracts.

Throughout my scholastic career, I've rarely had a deadline more than six months away. If I hadn't been a warped teenager already looking at graduate schools, you rarely plan more 2-3 years ahead. Now, I have to somehow shift from the last 16+ years of sprinting to running a marathon...

Advisor Frustration

Not cross posting, because I'm just whinging. Feel free to ignore.

I'm in the process of writing up my thesis proposal, which has included a rather vast literature search, covering the experimental results for various common composite materials and the simulation results for such composites and their constituent materials. My advisor has finally agreed to my magical idea to integrate The Project That Won't Die (still) into my Alleged Thesis Topic. The PTWD is on material A, which happens to be a rather common composite material, so we're adding it in as a second reinforcement material to study, which means I can incorporate a lot of my existing results into earlier chapters. Huzzah. But.

In doing this whole literature search thing, it's becoming painfully apparent that the PTWD would be a much more logical thesis topic. Seriously, we've got data for four papers *so far*, and I've got ideas for several more. Neglecting his editing speed, it would not be unreasonable for me to be part way done writing my dissertation when my DoD fellowship runs out in 2013. However, it's painfully clear that he's relying on me to produce data to make the lab's productivity look better to grants that I'm not funded on. When I asked about just changing topics, the answer was no, because he says he can't find funding to support the PTWD (which I believe).

So back to working on the early stages of my Alleged Thesis Topic.

/whining

Editing Efficiently

Also available here

My regular readers are aware of some of my issues with my PI's time management skills. One particular issue is how long it takes him to give feedback on data and manuscripts. His approach is to immediately starting editing sentence by sentence, refining every detail, without reading through the overall paper.

Because he's a) busy and b) been busy so long he's got a backlog, this can mean that even if he's actually working on the paper (which is a whole separate can of worms), it can still be two months before you recieve *any* kind of feedback except by accident. Accidental feedback is things like while jetlagged, he mentioned that he was working on my paper, but the flow was rough. When I went and re-read it, my paragraphs were jumping all over the place like bunnies on speed, which is just how my brain seems to work. So I calmed the bunnies down, reorganized some thing and sent it back the next day. This apparently surprised him. I just thought it was the point of feedback...

This is also a problem because it means that he doesn't look at the data or conclusions until he's had the paper for quite awhile, and that's the feedback most of the students in my group are looking for. Does the model seem reasonable? Do the conclusions make sense? Are there more experiments/simulations I should be running?

When I'm editing for others, I usually try to read through once to get a feel for the overall flow, and then go back and start fixing the little things. I read absurdly quickly, so I find this technique rather helpful. It also gives me a chance to spot any big problems more quickly.

Editing my own stuff, I do it the other way around (since I already know where I'm trying to go). I have to take time away from the document before I can edit for flow, because otherwise my train of thought just follows the same tracks.

What's your editing strategy?

Vertigo and Productivity

I have now been slightly dizzy on and off for 4 days, mostly on. This can stop any time now...

Today's guest post at Scientopia is a rehash of an earlier post here.

I have now officially found people willing to be on my committee! Now, to find a two hour block of time that at least 3 of the 4 can attend... Did I mentioned I'm one of four people in my group doing a preliminary proposal in the next month?  This is why I was originally aiming for May or July. Thankfully, next week marks the end of the summer conference season for my lab group, so I can finally go back and figure out things that went wrong back in June instead of producing slides for my advisor's speculative abstracts.

Speculative Abstracts and Golden Children

... are the bane of my existence. Because my advisor wasn't willing to say no to an invited talk, in an area in which no one in my group is actively working, I now have major deadline convergence, between the Project That Won't Die (PTWD) and the Project My Thesis (proposal) is On (PMTpO). Combined with recent server downtime for maintenance, I'm alternating between panicked analysis/coding and thumb twiddling while I wait for something to run.

PTWD is producing the data for his invited talk, while PMTpO needs to have results for the annual funding review (we'll ignore that I'm a fellowship student). I think under normal circumstances, my advisor might have been sane enough to say no to the invited talk, but the invitation was from his perpetual Golden Child, who somehow remains the golden child, despite having left for a professorship position three years ago.

This isn't the first time my advisor submitting abstracts has resulting in non-thesis work for me, requiring generation of fairly substantial amounts of data in short times. However, I've been here for 2+ years now, and I can't recall this happening to other students in my group. I'm chalking it up to egocentric obliviousness, but my code is done for the moment, and it's time to switch from thumb-twiddling to panic.

This is the project that never ends....

My advisor was in town briefly yesterday, and managed to stop by the office in the sub-24 hour period he was going to be in the correct time zone. He's finally started reading the manuscript that's been sitting on his desk longer than I'm comfortable admitting. Foolish me, I was hoping this would be a sign that the associated project might wrap up sometime soon.

Despite the fact that the funding for this project ran out over a year ago, and I'm supported by a completely different project (i.e., my alleged thesis topic...), half of our brief meeting time was spent with him talking about all the things he wants to do next for this project. Note that this project was supposed to only be for my first summer, to get me acquainted with molecular dynamics, and help the post-doc working on it wrap up his papers.  So a project that was originally intended to last 3-6 months has now taken two years, and the papers *still* haven't left the building.

I'm reluctant to simply announce that I'm done with this particular branch of work, because I'm sitting on three more manuscript drafts, and I would like them to make it out the door sometime before I manage to. On the other hand, the longer I'm working on this first project, the longer it's going to take me to get fully entrenched in my supposed thesis project. It doesn't help that it takes some serious shoe-horning to try and get both of these projects into a thesis together in any sort of semi-coherent fashion.

Any suggestions for how to tell my advisor that I would like to work on my thesis project full-time?

An Advisor to English Dictionary

Part of any working relationship is learning what certain phrases actually mean beyond the direct statement. Below are some of the phrase my advisor uses and their translations.

"We need to meet sooner rather than later": I'm about to double your work load for the next 2 to 6 weeks. You may or may not actually get credit for this.

"I need to think about it": You're going to have to keep nagging me about "it" because it's low on my priority list.

"Soon": yesterday

"Coming up": usually two weeks or less, in reference to "I have a meeting coming up and I need you to do (these things that take longer than two weeks).

"I'm not sure": for a single item, typically means no. If trying to get a sense of priority between two items, it means do both.

"Here is the final version": if you wait another hour, I'll have completely changed my mind about something.

"I'll do it this weekend": I may do it in the next month with sufficient nagging.

DISCLAIMER: every advisor is different. Some translations may not hold for all advisors.

What phrases does your advisor use that can't be taken at face value?

How Advisors Are Not Like Bosses

In a number of very critical ways, being a grad student is not the same as having a job. One of these is the difference between your advisor and your boss.

Academia is a weird place sometimes, and part of that is due to the organizational structure. Superficially, it's not a terribly odd organizational chart, but many times, the actual nature of the relationships in academia is fundamentally different than the analogous relationship in industry.

Difference #1: Deadlines
Graduate school is sometimes a strange limbo of hazy requirements with no firm timeline. Other times, there are firm deadlines, but these are somewhat sporadic. Your advisor is not going to stop by your desk and say "I need the report for the widget on Tuesday for the division meeting." (most of the time).

Difference #2: Performance Reviews
In graduate school, it is unlikely that you will ever sit down for a formal performance review with your advisor until it's approaching time for your defense or unless your professor spent time in industry. More importantly (from the grad student side), you will also never review your advisor's performance. Some larger corporations have a system from underlings to review their managers. Grad students don't have this sort of mechanism, so we resort to whining on the internet.

Difference #3: Advice 
Advisors, at least in theory, are there to help give you advice about how to advance your career and achieve your goals. While there are managers who do this, it's not strictly speaking part of their job. Of course, there are also advisors who aren't very good at this, but it's in the title...

Difference #4: Dependancy
If your manager quits, gets fired, or moves to a new position, this means you get a new manager, but may very well still be working on similar projects, and things are relatively stable (assuming everything goes smoothly). Having an advisor quit, move, or get fired can be much more difficult. You're typically required to have someone advising your research, and if you're very far into your project, switching advisors could very well entail losing years of work. If your advisor is moving, you might be able to follow them, but that's not an easy proposition in most cases.

You also very likely depend directly on your advisor for funding and access to resources. There's not someone above them you can go to (i.e., your boss's boss) when you need order forms signed and they're out of town. The independence of your position is much murkier: you don't work for Corporation or University, you work for Advisor at University. Different schools may also deal with this differently, adding to the confusion.
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I'm sure there are plenty more differences, and that there are special cases that disagree with every point I've made above, but in my humble experience and observation, these generally have been true.