[Grad2022] [Turnbull Zemi] Individual meetings

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Hi,

There will be Zemi tomorrow at 1pm as usual, but I'm canceling the
individual consultations with everybody but the M2s and D3s this week
because I have *no documents* to work with from anybody else.  Not
even emails.

I can work with circumstances where a couple of students have exams or
travel or some other reason for not submitting work product.  There
simply is not enough time in a day to work with a dozen students none
of whom have provided reports on what they have been doing and what
they are planning.

Written work takes *more* effort for the *students*, less for the
*professor*.  But it also has benefits for the student.  Forcing your
thoughts into written words in advance sometimes makes them more
precise (and you are more free to use a dictionary!), and sometimes
makes plain to you just how imprecise your thoughts are, and gives you
the time to refine them before talking to someone else.  To the extent
that your thoughts are precise, but wrong or incomplete, your mentor
can help you correct that efficiently.  Where they are imprecise and
both sides know it, a free discussion can take place about just how to
refine those fuzzy thoughts into a task.  And sometimes the student
writes complete garbage and doesn't know it.  Professors do that too,
just less frequently and we usually manage to avoid doing it in
public.  If you're producing complete garbage, wouldn't you rather
that I'm the only one who ever knows about it?!

For my part of the advising relationship, the benefits are that I can
check your references and sometimes look for some of my own to
understand what you are trying to do.  I can think carefully about how
I would approach the problem for comparison.  I can think carefully
about the issues with your plan and avoid starting on the never-ending
staircase I describe next.  (Yes, it happens to professors, too.)

"Just walking in" to a professional discussion without careful
preparation has severe downsides, especially for students.  A lot of
time is wasted forming thoughts into words, and the words are often
not as good as if you spend the time to write them down.  The
discussion tends to go around in circles, with the mentor providing
criticism, the student responding, and so on until after two or three
revisions the students arrives back at the original idea, without
recognizing that they've gone full circle and still haven't resolved
the original criticism satisfactorily.  I think this is one of the
most important skills for an expert (whether an academic researcher, a
staff researcher, or a consultant): recognizing when you're about to
return to an idea you had discarded, and going somewhere else.  It's
all too easy for research to turn into this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascending_and_Descending
without that skill.  (Another Escher lithograph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_(M._C._Escher)
is perhaps a better model in that it indicates how the researcher can
be pulled in different directions in different contexts, thus arriving
at the same place after "improving" the work several times.)

I don't know what you are doing with your time, and in some sense, I
don't really care because each person's work habits are going to be
somewhat different when doing "expert's work" like research.  But it's
important to be doing it continuously and recording your intermediate
results because you cannot hold it all in your head, or do all the
needed thinking in one sitting.  It's very expensive to pick up a
project if you haven't thought about it for two weeks or more.  You
forget what you were doing, you forget what you wanted to do, and
often you come back with a different idea of what you "should" do that
conflicts with what you were doing before you took a break.  That's
not always a bad thing, but it really slows you down if you do it
often.

You should be working on whatever your next graded product is several
times a week, usually for a couple of hours at a time.  In the first
year, 2 hours 4 times a week is about what you should aim at as a
minimum considering that most students want to finish course work in
the first year.  This is enough to select a theme and prepare a
research plan, most of which is *creative* work.  You shouldn't expect
to do more than 3-4 hours of creative work in a day consistently, and
if 2 hours of that is really productive you're doing well (although
sometimes you may have a brainstorm that lasts 24-72 hours with a few
hours of sleep).  Creative work includes defining a theme, planning a
project, planning analysis, writing results, and writing the thesis,
including revising for vague goals like "improving readability".

When you have time (C module with no or few classes, summer vacation)
you can spend time on routine work: collecting references, reading and
taking notes on previous research, organizing notes into a database
you can reference, formatting your paper to university standards,
learning software, inputting data, producing "clean" datasets,
producing nicer diagrams and tables, revising written work according
to specific direction, checking written work for typos and other minor
errors, and so on.  Much of this work you can do until you fall down,
some requires a higher energy level.

See you tomorrow.

Steve