This class is a continuation of the discussion started in the previous two student-only panels on debugging unhealthy self-expectations and on managing advising relationships, focusing more on research project management. The objective and format for these panels therefore followed the same structure with one exception. To keep the panel engaging for the whole two-hour block, we listed questions (submitted by students) by theme on slides. For each slide, we had each panelist respond to questions in small groups. We would then ask for volunteers to share what they learn, rotate panelists, and repeat. We found this to be more engaging for students.
Pre-class work:
- Revisit this list of worries and implicit expectations we came up with as a class on our first day.
- Do you find yourself relating to the same worries from the start of the PhD? If so, what expectations are still behind those worries? If not, how have your worries changed?
- Describe an experience you’ve had with an advisor, peer, etc. in the past year that either reinforced or challenged an expectation you held.
- This week, we’ll be joined by senior Ph.D. students for a panel on effective research practices. What question(s) do you have for the panel?
Question Bank
- Navigating academic culture:
- How do you negotiate the biases of a research community (as well as your own biases) towards a certain type of research vs. what you may personally find actually useful/valuable/enjoyable? (i.e. how do you manage intellectual hierarchies, like how careful empirical work is regarded as less valuable than theoretical work).
- Project management:
- Have you ever dropped a project? How do you know whether to drop it or to try to salvage it / pivot to get a publication out of it?
- What are sources of stress/pressure while doing research, and do you consider those positive or negative?
- How do you pick a good project?
- Do you ever realize your understanding of a research project or core concept has been wrong for a long time (e.g. a few months, or years)? How can you not get flattened by the realization?
- Is it better to share smaller chunks of research — like individual theorems, or small collections of experiments — with my research community at a faster rate rather than share complete projects on lengthier timelines?
- How do you know when a project is done?
- What does it mean to have on a project for X amount of time (e.g. a year)? What does each stage of the project look like?
- What skill has contributed most to your progress?
- Time management & self-organization:
- How do you manage your energy/expectations to avoid burnout at times when you have lots of ideas all vying for your attention?
- How do you balance different research-related activities (e.g. reading papers, coding, etc.)?
- How do you manage your summers so that you don’t get lost in the lack of structure?
- How do you manage multiple projects? How do you context switch between them efficiently?
- How do you manage transitions between projects?
- How many projects do you like to do at a time? why?
- Managing advising relationships:
- Do you consider yourself to be friends with your advisor(s)? Is this a good/bad thing?
- How do you give your advisor feedback?
- Do you find it helpful to connect with people outside your lab? Who do you connect with and how has that helped you?
- What do you do when your advisor wants you to work on a project you’re not excited about?
- How do you find new collaborators?
- How many unofficial faculty mentors do you have? How do you nurture your relationships with them alongside the official/research mentors? What are some ways that they have supported your growth?
- Managing the Ph.D:
- How have your research practices changed since your first year of the Ph.D?
- What research advice would you give your first/second-year self?
- Are there aspects of the Ph.D. that used to be hard but aren’t anymore? Are there parts that remained hard?
- What do you consider as the important milestones of Ph.D. student growth?
- If you had doubts about whether you wanted to finish the Ph.D., what made you choose to stay?
- Other avenues for publication:
- Have you had projects that came about from casual chats with peers/collaborators/advisors?
- Have you published a serious paper based on a course project?
- Ph.D. program requirements:
- How do you pick a class to TF? How/when do you do it?
- When do you start thinking about your dissertation?
- Additional tips:
- Are there any useful sources of funding? travel grants? extracurriculars?
- What’s networking for, and how do you do it well?