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y manage budgets foster relationships with a broader scientific community attend conferences project meetings and site visits and do some research its not too much its very doable but its much more faceted than grad student responsibilities ready you for as a grad student your responsibility is typically to do your research and occasionally teach or take classes there is relatively little necessary by way of prioritizing which of many projects and tasks need your attention i see the challenge in transitioning from student to professor like this the motivational chops you honed during grad school have made your job as entertaining and rewarding as tv video games and the beach now you need to repurpose them so that the frustrating parts of the job are as entertaining and rewarding as fun parts everyday i make two lists one things i want to do two things i don t want to do things i want to do usually includes reading papers and writing code some errands grant ideas sometimes course planning things i don t want to do are typically bureaucratic plus i ve got a rule that if i ve put the same task on the want list for three days running my attitude has outed itself and its actually a don t want kind of thing through the day i go one for me one for them one from column a and one from column b and everyday there are a couple of things that i don t want to do that i ve found some way to avoid doing i ve tried a lot of approaches to bring order to the responsibilities that being a professor entails the most basic lessons i ve learned are these 1 write everything down i ve got a decent memory but there s no way that i can keep my schedule and the status of each students project and other milestones and what i was thinking about yesterday at hand without a lot of notes 2 let go days are not long enough when i go to bed there is always something left undone make sure that it s not something truly important 3 do a little bit of soul sucking work first thing in the morning every day this keeps it from building up leading to dreaded days that are totally eaten up by it spending a full day on bureaucratic maintenance to dig out is something that i sincerely hope no grad student ever has to grapple with it i treat this like the nuclear option it s a clear sign that i ve made a bunch of time management mistakes in the previous week month 4 keep on top of email even when traveling or facing down a deadline see above one thing i m still trying to get my arms around is managing my time for priorities of different durations handling tasks for the day or week is pretty easy pegging against milestones like paper and grant deadlines presentations at conferences or grant meetings is pretty easy it s harder for me too keep a longer perspective and give enough weight to the task that s not needed in 2 weeks but one that might have impact in 2 months or 2 years this medium to long view is harder to maintain and harder to integrate into daily priorities get a little better every day posted by unknown at 1 55 pm 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday july 07 2014 things i didn t know before becoming a professor 4 different types of collaboration there s a romantic and resilient fantasy of the scientist toiling away in isolation he sad to say it s almost always he emerges from the lab bleary eyed and triumphant and shares his genius with the world da vinci frankenstein edison einstein every evil genius zuckerberg our science narrative has expanded to pairs of geeks in garages hewlett packard gates allen jobs wozniak brin page but hasn t yet embraced the fundamental reality of modern science most work is done in collaboration most great big ideas are the product of many great small ideas this is why there s no satisfying answer to questions like who invented the atomic bomb was it fermi einstein oppenheimer of course al gore didn t invent the internet but who did as a graduate student you are at worst igor the hunchbacked assistant doing all the work and getting none of the credit at best you are a near equal collaborator with your advisor but there s a sea of collaboration waiting once you re out of the nest and on to the next step since becoming a professor i ve noticed a handful of types of collaboration from intimate to remote they each have a role to play peer collaboration this can be the most satisfying and most productive way to work with a partner or team you sit in the same room or with a chat window open you talk through ideas big and small you tackle the parts of the work you re most suited to or most excited by you debug code together you run experiments together try to make sense of your shared results you iterate over writing papers together it can also be the most frustrating a group only walks as fast as its slowest member if you don t work well with your partners for any reason the stress is visible almost immediately if the partnership is strong you figure it out and get back to work if it s not you ll know pretty quickly mentor student collaboration there s a similar intimacy in this collaboration but there are some very clear differences first the pace of collaboration is typically slower at slowest you may only work with your student only once a week even if you re in regular email contact it s only a couple of times a day typically it s only during the most intense periods of an evaluation or paper deadline does the collaboration reach the level of immediacy and proximity of peer collaboration the division of labor here is more driven by the hierarchical nature of the relationship the mentor typically has a broader vision of the work while the student has a better grasp of the details or if they don t it s part of the responsibility and training to learn about the details the mentor has the responsibility of contextualizing the work either into a broader research agenda that will include the students thesis as an offshoot or into a broader project or publication at the start of the relationship the mentor is typically responsible for guiding the research determining which research questions are most fruitful and over the course of graduate study a good mentor student collaboration will take on more characteristics of a peer collaboration with the student ultimately initiating most of the research ideas but there s always going to be a level of deference that the mentor receives as a graduate student i had a lot of experience with the previous two types of collaboration i even had some exposure to the next three but so much as to be able to identify the differences or how they impact the work project collaboration on medium to large multifaceted projects there are frequently multiple pis principal investigators each with independent research groups collaboration across sites towards a common goal is different and challenging the pis coordinate with some frequency there are bureaucratic reasons for this mostly around budgets and report writing but coordination between students is much less common each of the individual research groups have their own broad responsibilities timeframes and agendas each are balancing a number of projects student milestones qualifying exams etc and specific personnel decisions the biggest difference in this kind of collaboration in my experience is the pace the interaction between groups when it comes to research is infrequent sometimes just a few times a month another difference is in the level of detail when the groups share their work it is usually at a relatively high level far removed from unsuccessful approaches and interesting failures there are opportunities to get advice at a high level about directions and plans but close collaboration about specific decisions and approaches is much less common this is completely understandable the nature of this collaboration demands it these projects are big enough to demand a large number of people working on them this task oriented partitioning into research groups is probably the best way to manage the effort however there s the time when the rubber meets the road this is usually in the form of deliverables where you have to send a report or code to a funder evaluations where all of the moving parts that the groups have developed have to work together or presentations at site visits or pi meetings where you have to show that you re all working towards a common goal often these moments demand closer coordination and collaboration having made a few mistakes the lesson i ve learned is to stop and drill down take meetings offline to deal with discrete questions and issues get the students involved in these meetings if at all possible visit your partners with your students one hour face to face can take the place of a few days worth of emails social collaboration still another step more removed is the kind of collaboration you have with the scientific community which you re a part of this is the sort of collaboration where you have a conversation with someone about an idea that one of you is chewing on you bat the idea around for a little while maybe hear about a technique you didn t know about or hadn t thought of and then the conversation moves on i ve found that this kind of collaboration occurs with someone you know either you know each other s work or you have a mutual colleague to bring you together most of the time this type one off micro collaboration ends with a single conversation sometimes it results in shared data or tools but given the right alignment of circumstances it can foster a more serious coming together usually just an extended conversation over email or a phone skype conversation but if fate is really on your side this can grow into a paper or a grant proposal but by this point you ve switched categories and you re working much more closely i find that this collaboration is most available during visits to other institutions and at conferences frankly this kind of collaboration is often the most valuable thing i take away from conferences public collaboration if you re doing it right people are going to know about your work people will email you with questions and comments you will get queries about how to use a tool you wrote or maybe more frequently a bug report or feature request through this communication you are supporting other people s research this rarely turns into a more substantial collaboration but if it means that people will cite your work here the collaboration is somewhat lopsided essentially your prior effort of writing a paper or tool are supporting someone s current research but this needs some additional support from your current self either in clarification or amendment the upside is that if the system is working you can garner this support as much as you give it out here i find the challenge is to appropriately prioritize these interactions more frequently than i d like to admit these are the emails that filter to the bottom of my inbox if you re reading this and i still haven t gotten back to you i m sorry i know these interactions are important i m working on it posted by unknown at 10 28 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday may 21 2014 things i didn t know before becoming a professor 3 how to run a research group at this point i ve figured out my classes and secured a little bit of funding now it s time to staff up the group and get to the work of research every researcher i know keeps a list of open questions and tasks that they want to get to next this list is a best friend and a worst enemy this list is a hydra every time an element is taken off two more appear in its place to tame the beast it takes a group effort it s no revelation to recognize that management is different from labor i m sure if i had an mba instead of in addition to a phd some of these issues would be more intuitive but i didn t and most professors don t we re self taught when the research group is firing on all cylinders it feels like my work is having a multiplicative effect that i m lifting more than i possibly could alone when it s not it s demoralizing i try not to get sucked into this but there are days when it feels like i could do more in a cave with a laptop an internet connection and coffee these are some of the things about running a group that i didn t know before becoming a professor how to organize a research agenda at my thesis proposal kathy mckeown asked me the hardest question what do you want to be famous for it totally blindsided me i laughed uncomfortably and looked to my other committee members for acknowledgement that this was an outrageous proposition no help was coming i have no idea what my answer was but it s the only question i remember from my candidacy exam proposal or defense a clear answer for this question an organizing principle for the research that your lab will do brings clarity and identity to the group it represents a research agenda that guides the work a clear research agenda serves a similar role as a mission statement and business plan it communicates your goals internally and externally this also helps with recruitment if students and postdocs know exactly what kinds of questions you are interested in you will attract people who are interested in these questions and people who are capable of working on them the same principle applies to students who are looking to do independent studies undergraduate or master s theses with you i ve generally under appreciated the value of this focus personally i ve benefitted from broad research interests i get a lot of satisfaction by working on a lot of different things my most cited paper wasn t even cited in my dissertation but i think i ve also suffered from this generalist approach i may have had greater impact on the questions i find most interesting had i limited my activities on the second tier i may have made more progress in getting famous for something how to engender community and collaboration being a graduate student can be isolating there are some classes a weekly meeting or two that you need to show up for but most of your work is alone how do you take a group of students who are organized only by you the professor and help them communicate support each other and become colleagues i certainly had no idea some things i ve tried taking everyone to lunch this didn t work so well it probably would work now but at the time the students didn t know each other well enough and it was just pretty awkward shared tasks inviting a group of students to work together on a short term project is the single best thing i ve done to get students to trust each other and exercise their basic research skills i use the interspeech paralinguistics challenges for these i also invite other computational linguistics students to participate from the linguistics and cs programs it s a really fun exercise and the students get a lot out of it weekly lab meetings one stud...