How to Do Research With a Professor

by Jason Eisner (2012)

Summary

This is a bit of advice for lucky students who get to do research with a professor.

Take this opportunity seriously. Either you make it your top priority, or you don't do it at all. That's the message. Read the rest of the page if you want to know why and how.

Why This Webpage?

I'd find it awkward to say these things directly to a nice undergrad I was starting to work with. It would feel like talking down to them, whereas I like my research collaborators—however junior—to talk with me comfortably as equals, have fun, and come up with half the ideas.

Still, it's important to understand up front what the pressures are on faculty-student collaborations. So here are some things to bear in mind.

How the Professor Sees It

[If the professor is male, click here.]

Your research advisor doesn't get much credit for working with junior students, and would find it easier and safer to to work with senior students. It's just that someone gave her a chance once: that's how she ended up where she is today. She'd like to pay that debt forward.

But should it be paid forward to you? Choosing you represents a substantial commitment on your advisor's part, and a vote of confidence in you.

Time Investment

The hours that your advisor spends with you, one-on-one, are hours that she no longer has available for

• retaining the semblance of a plausible life (sleeping / eating / parenting / avoiding divorce)
• consulting at rates of hundreds of dollars per hour
• preparing for class
• working on research with other students (grad or undergrad) or by herself
• staying current with the latest papers and techniques in the field
• discharging many administrative and reviewing responsibilities

So she does expect that you'll pay her back, by working as hard as she did when she got her chance.

Research Agenda Investment

Your advisor is not only devoting time to you, but taking a risk. You are being entrusted with part of her research agenda. The goal is to make new discoveries and publish them on schedule. If you drop the ball, then your advisor and others in the lab will miss important publication deadlines, or will get scooped by researchers elsewhere, or will be unable to take the next step that was depending on you.

So, don't start doing research with the idea that it's something “extra” that may or may not work out. This is not an advanced course that you can just drop or do poorly in. Unless your advisor agrees otherwise, you are a critical player in the mission—you have a responsibility not to let others down. Remember, someone is taking a chance on you.

Opportunity Cost

I heard once that your boyfriend or girlfriend will ask increasingly tough questions as your relationship ages:

1. “Am I getting something out of it?”
2. “Am I getting back as much as I'm putting in?”
3. “Am I getting as much as I'm worth?”

Your advisor may also ask these questions. At first, she'll be happy that she attracted a smart student to work on a problem that needed working on. But she may sour if she comes to feel that she's wasting her time on you, or would have been wiser to assign the project to someone else.

What Do You Get Out Of It?

You too are giving up time from your other activities (including classwork!) to do this. So what do you get out of it?

Most important, you get research experience. This is exceptionally important if you are considering doing a Ph.D.

• The Ph.D. puts you on a track to focus on research for the next 5+ years and possibly for your whole life. Are you sure you want to get married to research? Maybe, but try dating research first before you commit.

• Ph.D. programs are looking for students who are already proven researchers. Grades are not so strongly correlated with research success. The most crucial part of your application is letters from one or more credible faculty who can attest—with lots of supporting detail—that you have the creativity, intelligence, enthusiasm, productivity, technical background, and interpersonal skills to do a great Ph.D. with your future advisor.

A good friend of mine in college was taken under the wing of a senior professor in a different department. She was a demanding taskmaster, and my friend ended up spending much more time working in her lab than he expected. But it changed his life. She insisted that he apply to grad school in her field, and she got him accepted to a top Ph.D. program. He became a professor and is now the chairman of a department at a highly respected school, where he enjoys doing research with his own undergraduates.

Even if you are not considering a Ph.D., you will learn a great deal from working closely with a professor. Often you may be working with the world's leading expert on a particular topic—that's the main criterion for tenure here. (So our tenured faculty have passed this bar at some point, and most of our untenured faculty are successfully building a case that they will do so.)

Students don't always realize how respected and innovative our faculty are within their own subfields, but that's why you chose to attend a highly-ranked research university. Your advisor may or may not be a great classroom teacher, but she has shown herself to be extremely good at working with graduate students to produce papers that advance the field. What you'll learn from doing that is quite different from what you'll learn in the classroom.

What You Can Do to Succeed

Here's some basic advice targeted at new research students. There are also many webpages about how to be a “good grad student,” which should also be useful to undergrads doing research.

Time Commitment

• Make plenty of room. In order to make research your first priority, you may need to reduce your courseload or extracurriculars. This is worth discussing with both your academic advisor and your research advisor.

• Find out what the deadlines are. For example, there may be a target for submitting a paper to a particular conference. When planning for deadlines, bear in mind that everything will take twice as long as you expect—or four times as long if you've never done it before. Often a paper takes roughly a year of work for a grad student (if it includes experiments), although they may be working on other things during that year as well.

• Be honest. If you suspect that you may not have time to do justice to the project after all, don't string your advisor along. Take a deep breath, apologize, and explain the situation. Then your advisor can make an informed decision about whether to suspend the project, give it to someone else, etc. This is better than a slow burn of agitation on both sides.

Time Management

• Prepare for meetings. Establish a fixed time for weekly meetings with your advisor (and perhaps with senior students). Bring results, questions, and an agenda to your weekly meeting.

• Make weekly progress. Set goalposts, and be sure you make real progress from week to week. Use your meeting time or email each week to make sure that you agree on what the goal for next week is.

• Take the initiative. Be somewhat self-directed—find readings, play around with code, do mini-experiments. But do keep your advisor posted by email.

Writing

Writing is a form of thinking, a form of memory, and a form of communication. You should keep well-organized notes of several kinds. It is often useful to date your entries in such files and to keep them under version control.

• “Write the paper first.“ The evolving paper is a way of organizing and sharing your thoughts and hammering out details. New ideas (including future plans) can go into that document, or appendices to it.

• Experimental logbook. This is a file recording the questions you asked, the experiments you ran to answer them (including the command-line details needed to reproduce them perfectly), the results, and your analysis of the results.

• Notes on your reading, including reading you plan to do. This should be organized by paper and/or by topic, aimed at helping you quickly recover the important points.

• Planning. Keep some kind of to-do list and time planning system that helps you set and discharge goals and track your effectiveness (see the LifeHacker website for some options).

Working With Others

• Again, be honest. Be very clear at all times about what you do and don't understand. Don't fake it. It's okay to say you're confused or don't know something; you need to ask questions to get unconfused. Also be clear about what you have and haven't done.

• Pick a topic of mutual interest that you can handle. This is a matter for careful discussion at the start of the relationship.

• Be explicit about what you need from your advisor. You can take some initiative in shaping the kind of advising relationship that will work best for you. Every advisor has a typical advising style, which is some compromise between her advising philosophy, her personality, your personality, and the realities of limited time. But if you need a different kind of guidance or a different way of organizing your relationship, ask for it. Most advisors will appreciate the initiative and can adapt to some extent.

• Know how to ask for help. If you get stuck, ask your advisor to help you get unstuck! She can write out a more detailed plan for you, ask a senior grad student to work with you, give you things to read, point you to software libraries, etc. Asking the right person can be 100 times faster than doing it yourself.

  Your value to the project lies in how much you get done—it doesn't matter whether you invented it all yourself. This is not homework and getting help is not cheating. Anything that is already known in the field is fair game to reuse (with citations). And people can also help you invent the new stuff, as long as you acknowledge their help appropriately (perhaps with co-authorship). Getting them to help you is part of the research.

• Be a team player. If there are other people on the project, find out what they're working on. Ask plenty of questions. Get a broader sense of the project beyond your own little corner. Help out where you can.

• Share what you do. Back up your work and be ready to hand off your code and notes at any time. The project may live on after you. It's not necessary to keep private files. The best plan is to keep everything valuable in a shared version control repository that you, your advisor, and any other collaborators can browse and edit at any time. (A README file in the repository can list any additional resources, e.g., the URLs of a wiki, a Google Doc, etc.) An issue tracker is also useful. Discuss with your advisor how to set up this kind of project infrastructure, e.g., on github.

• Avoid diffusion. As a matter of etiquette, try not to spread your work over many different local directories, repositories, email threads, chat logs, Google documents, etc. For example, when sending email, try to continue on an existing thread where appropriate, rather than starting a new one. Your advisor is juggling more email and projects than you, so will find it helpful to keep related things together.

• Keep track of what you've done. You may want to keep some notes on your contributions. You can give these to your advisor when it is time for a letter of recommendation.