Advising Expectations Basics
While I've mentored many students over the years, I'm entering a new phase in my career where I will be officially advising graduate students. This post is a first pass on what that means to me.
2020
Regarding Graduate Student Service
People who know me know that I am a huge proponent of treating academia as work. However, we do not work in a system that is particularly compatible with a modern notion of labor. The following advice attempts to balance how things should work (i.e., compensating people on the basis of their labor) with how they actually work (i.e., the reliance on unpaid work that is high value but not valued highly).
Forms of address
Choosing the wrong forms of address is the fastest way to make a bad impression over email. However, it is one based on norms and therefore is not typically explicitly taught.
In the general case, we can capture how you should choose the form of address via flow chart:
Research philosophy
Everyone should have an elevator pitch about their research. When we start out, that pitch is very focused on a particular project, problem, or technique. As time passes, we form a more expansive research vision that can encompass new domains, related problems, and complementary techniques, but still ties everything together in a coherent philosophy, with a long-term goal. My pitch is: programming languages (PL) and software engineering (SE) form the methodological foundation for next-generation advancements in data-driven scientific inquiry. Just as scientific instruments made new experiments and discoveries possible, so too will new programming languages, systems, frameworks, and platforms.