How To Communicate With Your Advisor Well

1
How To Communicate With Your Advisor Well

• 2008.3.28.
• Sue Moon
• Associate Professor
• Computer Science Department

2
Why Did You Pick Your Advisor?

• Research Topic
• Personality
• Fringe Benefits

3
What Have You Come For?

• Research Topic
• Personality
• Fringe Benefits

4
Your Dilemma

• Though research topic is the only thing you care
  for, the rest are all still important
• gtYou need to balance and manage your
  expectations

5
Assumptions You Should Not Make (I)

• Your advisor remembers or knows
• What undergrad courses you have taken and not
• How fast and well you can read a paper
• How good a programmer you are
• gt Bottomline S/he doesnt know your background
  as much as you wish

6
Assumptions You Should Not Make (II)

• Your advisor remembers or knows
• What project you are in charge of (unbelievable,
  but a reality!)
• What program you have written today
• What paper you have read this week
• What equations you have solved this month
• gt Bottomline S/he cannot keep track of what you
  are doing as much as you wish

7
Assumptions You Should Absolutely Not Make

• That your advisor read all the papers you have
  read and understand your problem perfectly and
  knows the answer
• Then its a solved problem. Why are you working
  on it?

8
Your Advisor Is Your 1st Audience

• Who is
• reasonably smart
• well-read in your area of research interests
• extremely interested in your research ideas
• committed to exciting brainstorming sessions
• able to drag you out of a research path that is
  passé
• happy to be the first, second, n-th reader of
  your work before publication
• and
• capable of providing you with resources you need

9
Your Advisors Physical Limits

• You are 1 of N students
• Your project is 1 of M projects
• Your paper is 1 of S papers
• S/He teaches 1 to 2 courses a semester
• S/He attends 1 to X committee meetings a week
• S/He travels 1 to Y times a semester
• S/He reads ZZZ papers to catch up with N students
  working on M projects and to turn around X
  committee meetings to meaningful changes

10
Still Your Advisor Is Likely To Remember

• Big picture of your research interest
• Probably not the details of what you explained
  last time you met
• Recommendations
• At the beginning of a meeting, very briefly
  explain what you have done up till last week (big
  picture) and then the weekly delta (details)
• It is good practice to summarize your own work
  and also remind yourself of the original
  motivation

11
Every Time You Meet Your Advisor

• Do your best
• To break away from the assumptions and remind
  your advisor of your past achievements
• To communicate that youre making a steady
  progress, not one big bang some day your advisor
  knows well enough not to expect that Rome could
  be built overnight
• And your advisor will expect
• Steady progress slowly picking up speed
• Your happiness in that you got what you came for

12
Speak, Write, and HackPick Two!

• - Stefan Savage

13
Good Luck!