Complementary skills.

Outline:

• Objective: I want to stay a scientist and not be a manager. The goal is to be more productive. i believe junior students do help with this. Teaching someone something.
• Apprenticeship and first-author work
  • They should see me perform.
  • Develop a curriculum
  • Their work may repeat mine. (allows me to focus more on the big picture).
  • being a coach. issuing challenges.
  • Create an environment where they feel ownership and are willing to challenge me.
• Selecting students:
  • skills. have statistical knowledge. will understand our work.
  • students who know what they want.
  • dedication.
  • I will look for students that appreciate the elements of my work.
  • What will you get out of the phd?
• Career
  • Should look beyond the single paper and understand how to best shape their trajectory.
• Lessons I teach over and over again:
  • when to follow and when to lead https://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/
  • teach my research philosophies:
    • Statistical thinking
    • empirical thinking
    • multiple year research horizon
  • A research paper as a process
  • Taking notes as organizing knowledge
  • Looking for elements that you want to incorporate into your own work.
  • communication.

1. This is my style of mentoring, but I try to put students on a project that I am currently working on and I find important to succeed. I try to aim for co first authorship on my papers.
   1. I am typically not as worried about the scope of my student’s work on my project. I want to get them up to speed so that they can be a genuine collaborator and contribute to the project both implementation-wise and intellectually.
   2. My mentoring style is to put the student on the most important part of the project, and do the same set of experiments together, then discuss. This gives them involvement and eventually they will be able to handle the experimental side themselves.
2. Develop students holistically. Try not just to give them easy parts of the projects that need labor. Students will need to be taught, from simple things such as using the cluster, to more high level things such as overcoming research roadblocks.
   1. This includes teaching them harder skills such as statistical thinking or rigor.
   2. This also includes softer skills such as communication and career guidance.
   3. Checking in with the students often and understanding how they work and what they are blocked by is a good teaching opportunity. If you want students to make progress, you need to make sure they have all the tools you need.
3. This is a general point for collaboration, but students should feel like they have ownership over your project. Enabling people to feel ownership is difficult, but usually this involves some “give” — you let others define parts of your project, even if you don’t feel like it is exactly what you wanted.
4. Get to know your students. You should try to understand what their goals are, what they like, and how they see themselves as a researcher. That way, you can put the current work in the context of their goals.
   1. I try to ask my students often, how they feel about the project direction and the work that they are doing. By incorporating their feedback you also help build their sense of ownership.
   2. Try to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This also helps you decide how to best make progress on different research fronts.
5. I learned this from Robin’s advising: you should try to challenge your students appropriately. Sometimes when you offer challenges, students may surprise you. You should well understand their strengths though, before you issue these challenges.

For mentees:

• Typically, a common progression is for you to be a co-first author on a phd student’s paper, and then you are the lead of a second paper. A successful 1-2 is usually strong enough to get into a decent PhD program.
• My biggest advice to mentees is, at the beginning of your career, it is best to follow other people (and you’ll see even older PhD students / research scientists find a lot of success by just being followers). It is generally very hard to find your own success, and that is compounded by lack of experience. Sometimes you need to trust that your mentor has more scientific and publishing experience than you do and you need to just put in the work they ask you to.
• Remember that if this was the biological or chemistry sciences, every result on a paper is the result of the refinement of a process. You continually refine the pipeline that produces the results. So often preliminary experiments are just for exploration and not for the final paper.

Using AI: