Getting things done for your research

Our profession (if you can call it that) is what people call "creative", meaning that the process is as important as the results.  Sometimes it is very easy for the grad student to spend all his time on the process and left none for the results.  A technician told me, in his 25 years working at the university, he has perhaps seen only 1 out of 8 students who completed their research successfully.  Success, as in demonstrating how a new idea works and have the hard data to show, that is.  From my life as a grad student, I would say his estimate is in-line with my observations.

Unfortunately, for the outside world, this is perceived as "not getting things done".  What they think of use, however, has a hint of truth in it, and I would like to suggest ways to turn things around.

Mitigate your risk. Granted your success depends on a lot of things, luck being one of them, I think it is also the risky nature of graduate research.  You are charting unknown territory, and you won't know if something works unless you try it.   I have seen students going "all out", designing the most sophisticated equipment and ordering very expensive parts, only to see their plans fell apart for reasons unknown after investing only 4 years and almost $100k.  Now, if you are that grad student, will you spend that money and time to find out, or would you look for something that would provide feedback faster and cheaper?

Exercise judgement.  Good judgement and experience also help getting results faster.  If a professor suggests to you a possible solution that is not 100% certain, has a 8-week waiting time, and costs 600 bucks, you might want to look elsewhere for a solution.  In my case, I managed to find one that worked every time, worked that very evening, and cost nothing.  Always ask yourself if the end justifies the means, and if not, move on to something that does.

Know your limits.  No matter where you are, at some point you will end up doing things you are not very good at.  They will be the bottleneck of your progress.  Out of bravado (I am still accused of that once in a while) one would try to trek even further into unknown territory and get themselves exposed to further risk.  For things you are not good at, give it a day or two to try.  If the progress don't look too encouraging, look for ways to get around them, quickly.

Accept failures. Sometimes things stagnate out of fear of failure.  I waited about 2 months before I started my very first field test, because I was honestly afraid of seeing something to go horribly wrong.  It did, and it did throughout.  Thankfully things were minor, and could be fixed without causing injury.  The trick is to accept that things will go wrong, but take every steps to minimize your exposure if it does.

More difficult to deal with is, perhaps, when "bad" results arrive.  I had those on my desk, and it was discouraging.  I eventually found out what happened, but only a few months later.  I must admit, a trip to the supervisor's office might not give me a solution right away, but it would give confidence, and would have shaved 2 months off.

Clean up after yourself.  In the chaos of the grad students' labs, it is tempting to make patchwork solution that works right away to get you out of here.  It might sound like a good idea, but it slows everyone down.  A very able colleague got some results, got out, but it didn't take long to find out how he did it.  Good that we did a very thorough check (1 week) of the lab before we started.  Most of that time was spent on weeding out things that he introduced during his stay.

Grad research is no different than other types of work.  True, there is a lot more risk involved, but it is possible to moderate your risk with good judgement.  Once in a while, things will not work the way you wanted, but it is time to look for other interpretations (through other opinions).  Most importantly, knowing that you are not working alone, help others get things done as well.

Dealing with that guy in the lab

Every research group has at least one of those.  You know, that guy.  When he opens his mouth, no one understands him.  When he passes by the hallway, the technicians will whisper the damages he caused last week.  When he bring stuff in the lab, they look like booby traps.  And on the rare occasion when he finally gets to do work, the safety officer will come and shut it down.  He is bad news, but he doesn't seem to know that himself.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I started my lab internship.  I took an office occupied by a grad student, let's call him Steve, who left a week ago, seemingly in a hurry, judging from the clutter still on his desk.  A few weeks later, my boss told me Steve's story.  He came to study about 2 years ago.  Back then he didn't speak much English, so he failed his comprehensive exam.  As his English improved, it was getting very clear that he had no formal education.  It turned out Steve was a farmer, and he forged his papers so that he could get a student visa, because it was easier than getting a work visa.  I ran into Steve when he came back to picked up his stuff.  Apparently he became a taxi driver in another city.

Here is another one.  Let's call this guy Yeti.  He was easy to spot because you can smell him from a distance away.  He's the kind of guy who does the wrong thing at the wrong place at the wrong time at your expense.  He once asked me about my recent run-in with one of the other grad students, just when I was talking to that other student in question.  During a talk he asked the speaker about his son's recent coming out. Another famous stint involved Yeti replacing his colleague's name with his on a paper and published it in secret.  A slap on the wrist was all he got.  No one knew what else he did, but when he was finishing up, he got a lot of job offers and awards based on his "groundbreaking" work.  For a slap on the wrist it was a pretty good bargain.

When I started grad school (a long time ago) there was this Egyptian PhD student, let's call him Ali.  Ali was a laid back but brilliant student, and I learned a lot from him.  Out of good humor, he often refer to his wheeled, portable test rig as his "car bomb".  But something changed near the end.  He scored a shrubberry of a beard while he was writing his thesis, and became very strict with his religious regimens.  Then he disappeared three months before his defense.  His Muslim colleagues told me Ali had left to join the Taliban.  His car bomb is still on proud display in the lab.

A few years later I had the pleasure to work with this new student, let's call him Tuck.  Tuck got this name because he looked like Friar Tuck and spoke like Donald Duck.  Whenever he appeared, office items from our desks would gravitate towards his area.  Then hazardous chemicals started showing up on his desk, next to ours, in open containers.  A word from the safety officer didn't change things much.  He eventually moved office, taking all the chemicals with him.  When he came back two years later to pick up his stuff, his computer was taken apart, and the only thing left was the case.  Obvious angry, he called the police but they never showed up.  Consider it frontier justice.

Jogging memory again, a postdoc this time, let's call him Moe.  While he was with us, strange maladies would inflict upon our lab equipment.  When Moe asked me to fix them, it was pretty clear whodunit.  Once crunch time came along, he needed 30 copies of a 200-page annual report in a hurry, with colors and all.  He somehow thought it'd be cheaper to print them all in-house.  Half way through printing he'd spot some typos and whatnot and the whole print job would start over a few times.  Moe finally got his 30 copies after a week or so, but all the lab printers were damaged from overheating.  Back in the days when laser printers cost $1500 apiece, and color ink jets about half that, Dropping $500 at Kinko's didn't seem like a bad idea anymore.  But, hey, he didn't have to pay for the damage because, according to him, the printers, toners, ink cartridges, and paper were just "public properties".

Perhaps this one is the craziest I have seen.  Let's name this guy Bluto, another postdoc.  He's a older, stocky guy who showed up one day without notice.  No hi, no nothing.  He kept to himself, but in spite of that everyone seemed to mind.  That's probably because he kept gawking at a female colleague in the lab, let's call her Olive.  The fact that she was engaged to ... uh ... Popeye ... was no nevermind to him.  Passion overruled reason one day, and a fight broke out between Bluto and Popeye over Olive in the lab, and my friend Wimpy intervened before it got out of hand.  A couple police officers came to the lab the next day to investigate. Apparently Bluto reported an assault on him from Popeye after the incident.  Neither of them was there so Wimpy set the record straight.  We never saw or heard from Bluto since, nor the cops.  Popeye and Olive lived happily thereafter.

Presentations for the introverted

Where I went to grad school, there used to be a tradition called the annual seminar.  Students, with their research at various stages of incompletion, were asked to present their work, to be evaluated by the presiding professors. Unfortunately, these presentations almost always devolved into somewhat of a Roman gladiatorial spectacle. The whole system was eventually replaced by a more constructively themed orientation session.

Presentations are unavoidable.  You want your work known to your community, or at least to the right people.  You have 20 minutes to summarize years of hard work.  But you didn't have much time organizing your results, let alone presenting them.  And everyone is on the same boat so they cannot help you in that department.  How do you conquer your butterflies, or at least make them fly in formation?  I have a few notes that I would like to share, and I hope this would make you more confident over your upcoming presentation as well.

You are in control.  When you are presenting, they want to listen to your research.  Stop guessing what your audience want to hear and focus on what you want to say.  You would be surprised how much your audience appreciates it when someone finally takes the driver's seat.

The 10-20-30 rule.  Guy Kawasaki proposed this dead simple rule of thumb: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font.  Mind you, these rules were meant for start-ups pitching ideas to venture capitalists.  So here is the modified form for grad students:  10 topics, 20 minutes, 30 point font.  Typically these are the topics I cover

1. Introduction (1-2 slides)
2. Your problem (1 slide)
3. Your (proposed) solution (1 slide)
4. Theoretical background (1-3 slides)
5. General solution strategy (1 slide)
6. Each aspect of your solution (1 slide per aspect of your research)
7. Progress/results of your strategy (1-2 slides per aspect)
8. Interpretation of your results (up to 1-2 slides per aspect)
9. Conclusions / recommendations (1-2 slides)
10. Future work (1 slide)

So you have a minimum of 10 slides.  My research consisted of 4 aspects: analytical, experimental, numerical, and practice.  My presentation ended up to be 24 slides, including the title and thank-you slide.  Is it too little? Hell no.  Also, I have a 40-minute version of the same presentation with (just) 36 slides.  But this extended version contains no extra crucial information that the 20-minute version does not provide, other than additional graphs and figures (i.e., eye candy).

Know what you want to say.  There is a theme, ain't it?  Even though you don't have concrete results, there is still a point to your presentation.  Make this clear to your audience throughout, and you will become confident with it.  Also, it you can help it, do not present items that you don't feel confident presenting, just for the sake of filling up your time slot.  If you have to bring it up, put it at the end as "future work", instead of in the results section as "work in progress".

Less is more. As a consequence of using at least 30-point fonts on your presentations, you need to discriminate your information.  Figure out the one very important thing that you want to tell your audience with every slide and stick to it.  Everything else is either supporting evidence or embellishment.  Also, mainly out of fear losing track themselves, many presenters load their slides with words and recite them off the screen.  If you are the forgetful/nervous type (I don't blame you), use cue cards.  When lights are low, as it is almost always in presentations, no one will see you reading off cue cards.

Pace your way, your way.  You are the second element of the presentation, and don't forget, they are coming to see you.  Engage your audience with explanations, antedotes, and examples.  These things compliment the main points on your presentation, and makes things interesting for your audience.  You can also control the flow of your presentation much more easily with the amount of verbal communication.

Treat equations like figures.  If you have to present equations, treat it like you would for a figure.  Direct the audience to what are essential (i.e., important terms and their implications, contributing parameters, trends, etc.) instead of reciting the equation term for term.  Like this title suggests, also do the same for figures.

No bells and whistles.  Slide animations and transitions effects are lame.  So are weird slide layouts and inappropriate background and color schemes.  On the other hand, black text on white background is much more hypnotic than most minimalists think.  Find something easy on the eye.

Practice with reason.  I don't usually rehearse rigorously, because I run a risk of "scripting" it, and i will get nervous if I don't remember what I am scripted to say.  Instead, go through the slides quietly, make notes on them.  Present it to your colleagues for casual feedback.  The best way is to go, is knowing what you want to say, and say it.  If there is something the audience does not understand and care about, they will ask for clarification.

Going through these steps will force you to think very hard over your work, and what you should (and should not) present.  By the time you are done, you will have a very solid idea about the presentation.  There will be the first two minutes of awkwardness when you start presenting.  Once you find your momentum, however, you will be at ease, and so will your audience.  Again, there is no way to get rid of the butterflies in your stomach, but at least they will fly in formation.

Postscript: Too much information already?  At least take this one home. Treat your presentation as if it cost $20 per slide five secretary-days to prepare, just like the good old days before Harvard Graphics almost 20-odd years ago (that's even before Mugu's time).  I bet you will change the way you think about presentations very quickly.

Advice for thesis preparation

My thesis seemed like a monumental undertaking at the time of writing.  I started, scrapped and restarted three times, over two years before I gained enough momentum to get that all done.  I was still waiting for a lot of stuff to come together, mind you.  It was not exactly easy

If your grad department lets you compile a publication-based thesis, you're lucky.  For everyone else, I hope the following antedote would help all aspiring writers to get this done and get on with real life (quickly, hopefully)!

Don't panic. Often, you don't know what is missing in your research until after your start writing.  When you have one of those moments (and you will have many), take the time to put the missing pieces together.  You will become more confident with your work and, if not, you will at least know what to do to for improvement.

Use LaTeX.  LaTeX handles all the formatting for you, so you don't have to worry about your figures jumping all over the place.  For references and equations, its BibTeX and math mode will save you a lot of time and mouse clicks than their WYSIWYG alternatives.  Besides, it doesn't cost you a dime to pick up the legal version.  The lack of proofing tools might be a problem, but LaTeX front-ends like Texniccenter usually come with a spell checker.  It's not going to be easy learn, but you will be glad you LaTeX'd your thesis.

Get to the point.  You want your readers to know exactly what your problem is, what you did, and what your findings are.  So your introduction and conclusions/recommendations chapters should be short and direct.  I am talking about less than 10 pages each.  Literature review contains everything under your universe, and no one cares if you can't organize it.  Chapters on your research should contain just enough detail to guide your readers along, but not so much as to detract them.  All other interesting but not directly relevant information can be placed in the appendices.

Think hard about the scope.  When you are very confident about your research direction, invest the time to write down your thesis scope.  These few paragraphs will be a reminder of what you should be doing for the rest of your degree.  If you are on the right track, your scope would only need minor adjustments at most.

Use B/W figures whenever possible.  Unless it's a thesis on Visual Arts, chances are, your thesis will be printed or photocopied on B/W at some point, very likely by your committee.  B/W figures are much easier to read and reproduce.  In addition, it also forces you to look for ways to present the data effectively.  After all, admit it, you used color because you just wanted to copy and paste what your favorite charting program spat out.

Simple language.  If you know already what you want to write, then jot it down right away instead of toiling over a better way to write it.  It might not sound very elegant, but it got the point across, and (most of the time) that was all that matters.  If you still don't like how you wrote it, you will come back to it, which brings me to the next point ...

Proofread your thesis backwards.  A neat little trick I learned from my high school English teacher.  Start from the last page, and work your way back to the first.  This forces you to go through everything, and you will catch a lot of typos and grammatical errors.  You will also have the opportunity to rigorously examine your writing.

Save acknowledgement for last.  Having the acknowledgement page written out first gives you a false sense of accomplishment.  You will slack off, or wasting time embellishing this page.  When the going gets tough, the temptation will be there to write it.  Without this page to distract you, you will find yourself more focused, more motivated (maybe) to devote your energy on other parts of the thesis.

(Almost) seven years in Grad school ... point form summary

I am not going to write a novel, but I need a decent first post (after the intro, that is).  So, here is what happened, good and bad, during my seven years in grad school.  No explanations, ever; all I know is that they happened.  I am limiting it to 10 each to give an impression of balance and, as usual, I will start with the bad things first:

Bad things

1. Took a lot longer than expected
2. That incompetent, asshole professor who kept getting in the way of my research
3. The same asshole who wanted to steal a piece of the action
4. Other asshole grad students who are trying to steal a piece of the action
5. Being sent "messages" by wannabe overachievers
6. Leaving Mugu and Mrs. Ubuntu in limbo (When are you done, honey?  I have no fn' idea!)
7. Having to wait eons for things to happen (Sorry, man, but I have a huge backlog. You'll have to come back in two months)
8. Frustration of being alone when you are stuck
9. That grad student whose only expertise was pissing everyone off
10. For a long time being sidelined because of my (lack of) credentials

Good things

1. My research worked out, much better than everybody expected, even myself
2. Supervisor allowed me to control my own research directions and bailed me out when I was in trouble
3. Answered a lot of my own questions to satisfaction (I can be one stubborn SOB)
4. Met colleagues whom I can count on ... for life
5. Got to do research overseas
6. Earned respect of (some of) my peers, though it took a while
7. Finally got to jot down that quote I have always wanted on my thesis
8. The asshole (point 2 above) was "denied tenure" a month before my defense (yo name ain't gonna be anywhere on my research no more, mofo)
9. Met Mrs. Ubuntu
10. Got out knowing that nothing would be more difficult than those 7 years

Who am I? Why? Why now?

It's been a while since I earned my degree.  It took a long time, but all in all it was worth it.

A little bit of introduction.   I managed to get my degrees somewhere in North America, all three of them.  I have moved and worked around in different cities.  Being an R&D kind of guy, I like looking at very strange problems and see strange ways to solve them.  Still do, even after I married Missus Ubuntu ...

I came to do grad school because I wanted to further my technical knowledge.  When I came out, I learned a whole new bag of things, good and bad.  After hearing a number of my friends who are going to grad school, I realized that there are always something in common.  So I have decided to write it down, and hope that someone would find it useful.

Aren't there already enough websites talking about grad school already?  I have read them, too.  I think you need a blog that tells it like it is.  I am not going to even try to generalize my case.  Your experience will be different, and I encourage you to talk about it, but at least there is someone to relate to.

Like I said, it's been a while since I finished my degree.  I think as time goes by, it is getting "safer" to blog about it.  Some of the stuff I am about to write will not be very pleasant to those who are in the know.  Therefore, identities and physical circumstances have been altered to protect the innocent and guilty.  Yes, even the guilty deserves some level of anonymity.

But let me get one thing straight.  The path of academia is the one that I chose to take.  It is long and difficult, and I did not expect otherwise.  Even though sometimes I wish I had done certain things differently if I had it again, I have never regretted making the decision in the first place.  A friend of mine used to say, "whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger."  I still think he's right.