My expectations of students
- First, read the Graduate Study Survival Guide from Toshiya Hachisuka (a UCSD alumni!). I agree with pretty much all of his points (the only exception is
group meeting is a waste of time
).
- When doing research, you are the leader and the owner of the project.
You should: 1) Assess how feasible it is as a research project based on your own interests (the most important), the overall trend and culture in the field, your own ability, and physical constraints.
2) Decide when to cut loss and avoid sunk-cost fallacy.
3) Actively learn the relevant skills yourself - talk to relevant people, read the relevant books, DuckDuckGo the relevant keywords, digging old related work, etc.
4) Actively search for potential research ideas, and if low-hanging fruits appear, talk to me to see if it is a reasonable idea.
5) Tell me about your plans in meetings.
Note that graduate study is very different from undergrad study: there is basically no structure (and that's why I like it) and no one is going to tell you what to do.
You are expected to actively seek for tasks to do.
All we are going to provide are advices, and you don't have to listen to them 100% of the time.
Use your own judgement, and be responsible for your projects. That being said, do listen to the advices and think about them.
Ideally take notes if you are forgetful.
- Regarding how much to listen to your advisor(s), I recommend having a concept of "advisor debt" in your head. If you defy your advisors' opinions too often, maybe try to blindly listen to them a few times even if you don't agree (so that you have a chance to show them they are wrong!). If you always follow what your advisors say, maybe randomly try out something different that they may not have suggested (so that you can surprise them!). A good balance between exploitation and exploration is the key. I believe this strategy generalizes to workplaces outside of academia.
- What do I get in the process?
My main motivation to stay in the academia is to learn from a diverse set of people for a diverse set of topics, and stay on the frontier of human knowledge for the topics I am interested in.
As an advisor, I expect to learn from my students. You should be prepared to teach me things I don't know, explain things in detail, spoon-feed me the information.
You can tell me to read relevant information (and I will if I am interested), but tell me why it is relevant and how it will help your research.
In general, I want to learn things from you through the process of collaborating with you on research projects, instead of teaching you every single technical detail.
- What do I have to offer in the process?
By freeing myself from many of the technical details of the project, I am capable of thinking in much higher level, linking different ideas together, and assessing the broader impact of the project:
Is it even worth doing this in the first place?
Are we asking the right research questions?
What will be the consequence if we are successful?
I can provide inspirations for you to come up with your own research ideas from these higher-level links.
I am also likely to be much more familiar with the academic culture than you, so I can explain what other people in the community think to you too.
I will also teach you how to communicate with your fellow academics: communicating the idea well is actually 80% of the research (even though the rest 20% may take you 80% of the time).
In the process, I will also question you about all aspects of your research:
Is the project really as promising as you think?
Is the project really as boring as you think?
Why should people care about this project?
Sometimes we can brainstorm the answers together (so feel free to say you don't know, but only after you think hard about it), but be reminded that you are responsible for your own projects.
- Be optimistic. This may be the single most important trait of a researcher. You want to be optimistic and persistent about the outlook of your research. It might take a while, but eventually the issues will be sorted out. Be excited and focus on the fun part of research, don't focus on competition and don't spend too much time on self doubting.
- Be interesting and be different. With all the homogenization going on around the world, the last thing you want to be is "be like other graduate students". Don't follow what is trendy. Don't become another graduate students in the academic factory. Your "interestingness" is defined by your information entropy. Be unpredictable and be edgy. Establish your identity and figure out what makes you unique.
- Tackle challenging problems. Many students have the tendency to avoid topics that seem difficult (too much math or too much coding). Don't do this. In the age of paper overflowing and incremental research projects, tackling challenging problems is your real chance to stand out while not getting scooped. You will find out that "challenging" problems end up being easier because 1) less people are working on it (higher novelty and less scooping), and 2) if you spend sufficient time on something, most things become easy. Set the scope big at first, and shrink the scope as we find out what is solvable and what is not.
- Be prepared. In our regular meetings, you want to come prepared.
You should have an agenda in mind, sorted from high-level to low-level topics.
Remind people in the meeting what are the high-level problems we are solving,
what are the challenges,
what are our current solutions,
and what are our next steps.
You want to be efficient: recap at the highest level and describe only the important issues.
Maintain a mind map of how well the attendees in the meeting know about your project.
Probe them if you are not sure.
- Don't be afraid of making mistakes. It's very natural to feel stupid when doing research since research is about studying unknowns. It is thus tempting to avoid mistakes by doing less. However, such decision is unproductive because you achieve much less by doing less. When it comes to research, making mistakes is better than doing nothing. As a corollary, you should avoid analysis paralysis. A lot of the insights can be gained by diving into a seemingly impossible task even if you are not successful immediately.
- Don't judge people, and also don't be afraid of being judged. We live in a society where we are incentivized to constantly decide whether we "like" someone or not. We have also become extremely sensitive to people's judgement towards us. Neither of these are helpful in terms of research. Yes, you should have taste. Yes, you should try to do things where at least some acedemic people like. However, these thoughts typically hinder rather help coming up with original and insightful ideas. Focus on the ideas, not people.
- Be curious and open-minded.
Don't ignore your peer's research just because it's
irrelevant
to you (I ignored NLP for a long time and look where that has taken me).
It's always related. Be curious. Ask people about their research.
If they couldn't explain it well to you, it's their fault, not because you are dumb.
Ask questions so that they realize they did not explain it clear enough.
Be persistent and ask until you have a rough idea.
Similarly, do the same when you explain your research to other people.
Try as hard as possible to relate people's research to yours - sometimes it will lead to unexpected research ideas.
Besides, graphics is already a very small field, I don't see the point of further dividing ourselves inside graphics.
- Don't get bogged down by details.
Try to understand the high-level points.
You should always be able to reproduce the low-level details if given enough time. Use the power of abstraction.
- Be critical and have your own opinions.
When you read or hear other people's research:
Think about whether they are solving an important problem.
Think about whether you would have done things differently.
Think about whether they have achieved their goals as they have advertised.
Think about the next steps.
Think about the next steps of the next steps.
Think about the next steps of the next steps of the next steps.
- Be transparent. Actively communicate your thoughts, ideas, progress, and issues, to as many people as possible. The more you share, the more we have chance to figure something out together. Don't hide your ideas, that will only hinder the progress. The risk of afraid of sharing idea far outweighs the risk of idea being stolen.
- Attend talks and ask questions. When you ask questions, don't get bogged down by the exact details people do things. Relate their research to your own and ask questions that can help your own research. Remember - it's always related.
- Talk to people. Explain your research and ideas to as many people as possible. Explain it to different levels of peers: your family who know nothing about computer science, undergrads, grad students but not in graphics, grad students in graphics but don't know much about your subfields, grad students in graphics and know your subfield, professors in graphics, professors in other fields.
- Take notes of your research and document the important points and decisions you have made. This is not just for your collaborators but is very important for you. It reminds you why you are here right now and where you are going. Always track back to the higher-level points for every small decision you make. Revisit your decisions every once in a while.
- Different people are suited for different research styles. Find your own style - you don't need to mimic me or other people.
- Grad school is not a competition. It's a process of acquiring knowledge and communicating them. You are not ranked when you graduate by the number of papers you published. It's your own journey and it is irrelevant how other people did their own ones.
The important things to ask are:
"How much have you learned during the process?",
"How much have you taught other people?", and
"Have you had fun?".
Of course, finding a job after you graduate is a different aspect.
However, as a CS student graduated from UCSD,
you shouldn't worry about this too much unless you're aiming for something like a faculty position at Stanford.
- Our collaborators may have very different opinions compared to my points above. That's fine. Remember - you are the leader of the project and you should decide how to proceed.