Effective Communication with Your Advisor: Balancing Expectations

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 =>You 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 => Bottomline: S/he doesn’t 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 => 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 it’s 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 Advisor’s 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 you’re making a steadyprogress, 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!