advising
-
Reader Sameir had a question: “… I just found out that a student has copied my NSF proposal for his GRFP * and got awarded the fellowship. What should I do? On one side I think it is only a student and I should let it go, on the other hand this level of dishonesty is unacceptable.”
-
The semester is about to start. Which means that the summer is over. Which means that, in order to fully get into all the fall proposal writing around all the undergrad course teaching and insane service, I have to get these last two papers done and submitted, like, yesterday. So… Over the past few days, I
-
When I was last hiring a postdoc, I had no problem waiting several months for the candidate I really liked. Sure, we all want the person to start the second the grant starts, but it’s understandable that it would unlikely happen that a good candidate would have his previous appointment end simultaneously with the grant money appearing in
-
I have been a slacker blogger… But for a good reason! A lot of technical writing is happening these days, making sure papers variously get submitted/revised/come out before the proposal-writing lockdown commences in August. But there’s always time for a little rant! If you have been reading my blog for some time, you might remember that I think one of
-
Psycgirl had a couple of posts on mentoring that made me think about my own experiences. A while ago, I wrote a book review of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In”. There are several things I still remember about the book, and one is her view of mentorship: Mentors are problem solvers, give them a problem to
-
Over the past few weeks I have been working on papers with several students in parallel, and I am again pulling my hair out and wondering if there is a way to get the writing done and the students trained without me going bald. Reporting findings in written form is an inherent part of doing science.
-
A few weeks ago I chatted with a colleague. One issue that came up was this colleague’s frustration with a student whom the colleague recognized as very talented, someone with great potential in the colleague’s area of study, but also someone who had no interest in applying themselves towards achieving excellence. I understand where the
-
Over the course of the past few weeks, the topic of average PhD duration at different institutions came up. I am in the physical sciences; it is normal to expect variations among fields, but in a single field you’d think the PhD takes more or less the same amount of time across different R1 institutions. In reality,
-
In STEM fields, a graduate student works on supervised research and is part of a research group led by a professor. Learning how to write up technical papers for publication is one of the most important parts of PhD training, so the student will typically be tasked with producing the first draft of a manuscript,
-
There is a small programming assignment I like to give my beginning grad students or upper-level undergrads who want to do research in my group. The assignment is a reasonably simple but quite accurate simulation of a system they all encountered during undergraduate studies. Most students never really ask themselves what the approximations are that
xykademiqz 