*Concerns of Young Mathematicians* Volume 2 Issue 16 April 27, 1994 An electronically distributed digest for discussions of the issues of concern to mathematicians at the beginning of their careers. PLEASE FORWARD TO ANY POTENTIALLY INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS Please direct submissions and questions to Curtis Bennett, cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu , editor for the month of May. Next issue: May 4 To subscribe: Send mail to Charles Yeomans at cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Back issues and other information are available via anonymous FTP to ftp.ms.uky.edu, in pub3/mailing.lists/ymn-list. Table of Contents Item # Title ------ ----- 1 Editor's Notes 2 Looking for a Book by Jason Miller 3 How to Be a Good Graduate Student (Part 3 in a series of 3 parts) By Marie desJardins 4 Closing Credits _______________________________________________________________ Item #1 Editor's Notes: Thanks to all of you for making this month as editor as rewarding as it has been, and particular thanks to everyone who sent in submissions. It's been a sort of "feast or famine" month, submission-wise, with last week's edition the largest ever (at least by file size, if not by number of submissions), and this week on the sparse side, once again. Beginning next week, Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu will be taking over the editor's chair, and will stay there for the month of May. Another sort of transition is also taking place this week. Those of you who have been studying and memorizing the list of "administrators" of YMN will note that Kalin Godev's name is absent from this issue's credits. Kalin served as editor of "Concerns" for two months, August 1993 and January 1994, and has found it necessary to step down. I'm sure we all appreciate his efforts with the YMN and wish him the best of luck. Thank you, Kalin. Several readers have requested that we put the article on "How to be a Good Graduate Student" in the archives, available by ftp. That process has begun, and if it's not there already, it will be soon. Again, thanks to all of you for having made this month of editing a rewarding one. Happy reading and good luck. Jeff Adams adams@bright.uoregon.edu April Editor, Concerns of Young Mathematicians _______________________________________________________________ Item #2 Looking for a Book by Jason Miller This is a plea for those who have copies of Bott & Tu's text _Differential_Forms_in_Algebraic_Topology_ but do not forsee using them at all. Presently, Springer-Verlag has no copies in stock and has no resupply date (sources say it won't be for a year), and none of the 25 (or so) major University bookstores that we've called have copies (new or used). Many of our graduate courses (upper and lower level) reference this text, and our qualifying exams include material from the first chapter. If you have a copy that you'd sell, contact me via email and I'll take it off your hands. If you know where a copy _is_ for sale (e.g. it's at the local Barnes and Noble), please tell me. We need a bunch of copies. Thank you, in advance, for your help. Jason Miller University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill millerj@math.unc.edu _______________________________________________________________ Item #3 How to Be a Good Graduate Student Part 3 in a series of 3 parts By Marie desJardins [The following is an outline of the section titles of the entire paper: ABSTRACT (* part 1) I. Introduction (* part 1) II. Before You Start (* part 1) III. Doing Research (* part 2) A. The Daily Grind (* part 2) B. Staying Motivated (* part 2) C. Getting to the Thesis (* part 2) 1. Finding an Advisor (* part 2) 2. Finding a Thesis Topic (* part 2) 3. Writing the Thesis (* part 2) D. Getting Feedback (* part 2) E. Getting Financial Support (* part 2) IV. Advice for Advisors (* this week) A. Interacting With Students (* this week) V. Becoming Part of the Research Community (* this week) A. Attending Conferences (* this week) B. Publishing Papers (* this week) C. Networking (* this week) VI. All Work and No Play... (* this week) VII. Issues for Women (* this week) VIII. Conclusions (* this week) BIBLIOGRAPHY (* part 1) ] IV. Advice for Advisors In order to be a good advisor, you have to relate to your graduate students as individuals, not just as anonymous research assistants or tickets to tenure and co-authored publications. Work with all of your graduate students, not just those whom you feel most comfortable with, or who are interested in the problems you're most excited about. Try to get to know your students personally and professionally. Help them to identify their strengths and weaknesses, to build on the former, and to work on overcoming the latter. Give them honest evaluations of their work and performance: don't just assume that they know how they're doing and what you think of them. Read this paper and others like it with an eye towards discovering which aspects of the graduate experience your students may be having trouble with, or may not realize the importance of. Try to see the experience from their perspective, which will be different for each student, because each student has a different background and different talents and goals. The roles of an advisor include: 1 Guiding students' research: helping them to select a topic, write a research proposal, perform the research, evaluate it critically, and write the dissertation. 2 Getting them involved in the wider research community: introducing them to colleagues, collaborating on research projects with them, funding conference travel, encouraging them to publish papers, nominating them for awards and prizes. 3 Finding financial support: providing research assistantships or helping them to find fellowships, and finding summer positions. 4 Finding a position after graduation: helping them to find and apply for postdoctoral positions, faculty positions, and/or jobs in industry; supporting their applications with strong recommendations; and helping them to make contacts. Although guiding your students' research is normally viewed as the central task of an advisor, the other roles are also critical to their long-term success. The section on networking contains advice for students on networking. You can help them in this process by funding and encouraging travel to conferences and paper publication, and by introducing them and talking about their research to colleagues. A, Interacting With Students Especially for a new advisor, setting the right tone for student interactions is a difficult task. Different students respond best to different approaches -- and, of course, different advisors have different personal styles. Some of the tradeoffs that have to be made in each advisor-student relationship are: 1 Amount of direction: self-directed/hands-off vs. ``spoon-feeding'' topics and research projects. 2 Personal interactions and psychological support: do they want advice on career, family, and the like? Are you willing and able to give it, or to find someone else to advise them? 3 Amount and type of criticism: general directions vs. specific suggestions for improvement. 4 Frequency of interaction: daily vs. once a semester. It helps to establish regular meeting times and to discuss expectations (both yours and your students') about what can and should be accomplished during these meetings. Encourage them to develop relationships with other faculty members, students, and colleagues, to get a different perspective and to get feedback you may not be able to give. To improve the atmosphere of your interactions: 1 Meet over lunch or coffee to make interactions more relaxed and less stressful. 2 Strive to maintain an open, honest relationship. Respect your students as colleagues. 3 Tell them if you think they're asking for too much or too little time or guidance. Advisors should be aware of both long-term and short-term needs. What should the student's goals over the next few years be? Help your student identify ways that the two of you -- as a team -- can meet these goals. Advise the student on the criteria for a successful qualifying exam, thesis proposal, and dissertation. Help prepare the student for a future research career. In the short term, a good advisor will work with students to set priorities and to find a balance between doing research, reading, writing, satisfying TA and RA duties, publishing, and coursework. Although advisors may not be able to give advice on all administrative aspects of graduate school, they should at least know the appropriate people to refer students to for assistance with degree requirements, funding, and so on. When you meet with your students, pay attention to them. Try to help them to identify their interests, concerns, and goals, not just how can they meet what *you* see as good interests, concerns, and goals. Know what they're working on, and what you discussed last time. Take notes during meetings and review them if you have to. Give them productive feedback, not just a noncommittal ``ok, sure'' or a destructive ``why on earth do you want to do that?'' Remember that your students are still learning. If you tell them that a problem they're interested in has already been explored by Professor X, make sure you follow up with a reference that they have access to, and a discussion as to whether the problem remains a worthwhile area to work on, or whether there are new open issues raised by Professor X's work, at the next meeting. When reviewing a student's paper or proposal, write comments on the paper itself: verbal comments aren't as useful. Give the feedback promptly, or it won't be much help. See the section on feedback for suggestions about giving useful comments. Don't just wait until they hand you something to read: insist on written drafts of proposals, papers, etc. Help them develop their rough ideas into publishable papers. Give them specific, concrete suggestions for what to do next, especially if they seem to be floundering or making little progress. Advisor-student relationships can break down if the advisor is setting goals that are too high or too low, or if the advisor is exploiting the student to meet the advisor's needs, not the student's. In my opinion, it is never appropriate to develop an intimate relationship with one of your own students. If this should happen, you should not continue to advise them (whether the relationship continues or not). Encourage your students to choose a topic that you're *both* interested in and that you're knowledgeable about (or very interested in learning more about). Make sure that they have the appropriate background to understand the problem, and that the methodology and solution they identify are appropriate and realistic. Give them pointers to useful references and help them find them (this can be a mysterious, difficult process for graduate students). Make sure they're aware of other researchers and labs who are doing similar work, and if possible, arrange for them to visit these labs or meet the researchers at seminars or conferences. Women faculty often feel obligated to mentor every woman student in the department, attend every committee meeting, and get involved in every debate, whether they want to or not. While you can't solve all of the problems in the world, you can at least make a difference by giving other women (and men, for that matter) the sense that you do care, and that you think women's issues are important, even if you don't have time (or the inclination) to get involved with every problem. V. Becoming Part of the Research Community One of the most important things a graduate students should do is to become established as part of the research community. Your advisor can help with this process by funding conference travel, encouraging you to publish research results early, collaborating on joint publications, introducing you to colleagues, and promoting your work. In turn, you can make yourself more visible by participating in conferences and workshops, publishing papers on your work, and meeting and maintaining contact with colleagues. A. Attending Conferences Attending conferences and workshops is valuable whether you present a paper or not. Some of the reasons to do so are: 1 You'll meet people and have a chance to discuss your ideas and to hear theirs. 2 You'll get a good sense of what the current state of research is, and will learn more about how to write conference papers and give talks (sometimes by counterexample). 3 You'll probably realize that your ideas are more significant, relatively speaking, than you thought. A common reaction is ``I could write a better paper than this!'' If you're giving a talk you'll gain even more visibility, and will have an opportunity to make an impression on other researchers. Some tips for preparing your talk to make this impression as positive as possible: 1 Give a practice talk, especially if you tend to get stage fright. Be sure to invite people who will give you constructive, but useful, feedback. 2 Make sure your talk fits in the time slot allocated. There's nothing worse than a speaker who rushes through the last ten slides, or skips from the middle of the talk to the conclusion. A good rough rule is to allocate 2-3 minutes per slide, on average. 3 It's better to be somewhat abstract than to get bogged down in technical details -- but be sure you give enough detail to make a convincing case. Your paper should fill in the missing details, so that people can read it to get a more in-depth understanding. Know your audience: you'll have to give more background to a general audience, and more technical detail to audiences that are very familiar with the field of research you're discussing. 4 Use examples and pictures to illustrate and clarify your ideas. 5 Learn by observation: try to imitate qualities of talks that you like, and avoid things that other speakers do that bother you. 6 Talk about your ideas informally whenever you get the chance, so that the talk will come more naturally and, hopefully, you'll have a chance to respond to and think about questions that might get asked at the talk. 7 Make sure your slides are readable and as simple as possible. Never put up a slide with tiny text and say ``I know you can't read this, but...'' 8 Try to relax. Don't read from a script or word-for-word from your slides, and don't talk too fast. Be confident: you know more about your work (flaws and all) than anyone else. B. Publishing Papers Publishing your ideas is important for several reasons: it gives you a source of feedback from people who read your papers; it establishes you as a member of the research community (useful for getting a job down the line); and it forces you to clarify your ideas and to fit them in the context of the current state of research in your field. There are two key properties of a good paper: significant content -- original, important ideas that are well developed and tested -- and good writing style. The degree to which the paper's content has to be ``significant'' depends on where you're submitting it. Preliminary ideas and work in progress are more suitable for a workshop or symposium; well developed, extensively tested ideas are more appropriate for a journal. One way to decide where your paper should be submitted is to read papers in potentially appropriate publications (last year's conference proceedings; current journal issues). Another method to show a draft or outline of the paper to your advisor or other colleagues and ask their advice. if you have a great idea, but present it poorly, your paper probably won't be accepted. Be sure you know what the point of the paper is, and state it clearly and repeatedly. The same goes for the key technical ideas. Don't make the reader work to figure out what's important -- tell them explicitly. Otherwise, they might get it wrong, if they bother to finish reading the paper at all. State the problem you're adderssing, why it's important, how you're solving it, what results you have, how other researchers have addressed the same or similar problems, and why your method is different or better. Write for the audience that you expect to read the paper, just as you would plan a talk. Give more background for general audiences, less background and more technical detail for specialized audiences. Use a running exmaple if possible, especially if your paper is dense with equations and algorithms. Don't try to put every idea in your thesis into one conference paper. Break it down into pieces, or write one or two longer journal articles. As you refine your ideas, you can re-publish in new forms, but be sure you're adding new material, not just rehashing the same ideas. Some papers start as short workshop papers, evolve into conference papers, and eventually -- with the addition of detailed empirical results or formal proofs -- become journal articles. It's usually okay to publish the same or substantially similar papers in multiple workshops, but papers for conferences and journals generally have to be original, unpublished work. It is critical that any paper you plan to submit be read by someone else first, if only to check for typos, grammatical errors, and style. A good reviewer will give you feedback on the organization and content of the paper as well (see the section on feedback). The more tightly refereed the publication you're submitting to, the more trouble you should go to to have it pre-reviewed. For a workshop paper, having your advisor read it over is probably enough. For a refereed conference, have one or two other graduate students read it as well. For a journal paper, you should probably find researchers who are active in the field, preferably at other institutions (to give breadth), read it over and give you comments. This is where the network of colleagues you should build (see the section on networking) comes in handy. If your paper is rejected, keep trying! Take the reviews to heart and try to rewrite the paper, addressing the reviewer's comments. You'll get more substantial and useful reviews from journals than conferences or workshops. Often a journal paper will be returned for revisions; usually a conference paper will just be accepted or rejected outright. After reading the review the first time, put it aside. Come back to it later, reading the paper closely to decide whether the criticisms were valid and how you can address them. You will often find that reviewers make criticisms that are off-target because they misinterpreted some aspect of your paper. If so, don't let it get to you -- just rewrite that part of your paper more clearly so that the same misunderstanding won't happen again. It's frustrating to have a paper rejected because of a misunderstanding, but at least it's something you can fix. On the other hand, criticisms of the content of the paper may require more substantial revisions -- rethinking your ideas, running more tests, or redoing an analysis. C. Networking One of the most important skills you should be learning in graduate school is how to ``network.'' Breaking into the research community requires attending conferences, meeting established researchers, and making yourself known. Networking *is* a learned skill, so you shouldn't expect to be an expert at it immediately; but it is also a skill that you can, and should, learn in order to be a successful member of the research community. Just going to conferences and standing in the corner isn't enough. Especially if you're not normally an outgoing person, you have to make a conscious effort to meet and build relationships with other researchers. Presenting papers is a good way to do this, since people will often approach you to discuss your presentation. Introducing yourself to people whose presentations you found interesting, and asking a relevant question or describing related research you're doing, is also a good way to meet people. You should talk about your research interests every chance you get. (But be sure to spend some time listening, too: you'll learn more this way, and people will feel that your conversations are a two-way street.) Have summaries of your work of various lengths and levels of detail mentally prepared, so that you can answer the inevitable ``So what are you working on?'' intelligently and clearly. If someone expresses an interest in your work, follow up! Send them e-mail talking about new ideas or asking questions; send them drafts of papers; ask them for drafts of their papers and send them comments. (If you do this, they'll be sure to remember you!) Bring business cards with your e-mail address to conferences to help new acquaintances jog their memory. Maintain the relationships you form via e-mail, and by re-establishing contact at each workshop or conference you attend. If you work at it, and use your initial acquaintances to meet new people, you'll find that your ``network'' grows rapidly. Sometimes these contacts will grow into opportunities to do collaborative research. Seize these opportunities: you will meet more people, often become exposed to new methods of doing research or new subfields within your research area, and the responsibility you feel towards your collaborator may give you more of an incentive to stay motivated and keep accomplishing something. Other professional activities can bring you into the research network as well: volunteer for program committees, send your resume to a book review editor, offer to give seminars at other universities, write conference and workshop papers and send them to people you've met or would like to meet, or organize a workshop on your subfield at a larger conference. Mentoring junior graduate students and undergraduates is a good investment in the long run (besides providing them a valuable service and making you feel useful and knowledgeable). Finding specific mentors can be very useful. Especially if you feel that you are isolated at your institution, having a colleague at another institution who can give you advice, feedback on drafts of papers, and suggestions for research directions can be extremely valuable. VI. All Work and No Play... Finding a balance between work, play, and other activities isn't easy. Different people will give you very different advice. Some people say you should be spending eighty or ninety percent of your waking hours working on your thesis. Others (myself included) think that this is unrealistic and unhealthy, and that it's important for your mental and physical health to have other active interests. If you have a family, you will have to balance your priorities even more carefully. Graduate school isn't worth risking your personal relationships over; be sure that you save time and energy to focus on the people who matter to you. One of the keys to balancing your life is to develop a schedule that's more or less consistent. You may decide that you will only work during the days, and that evenings are for your hobbies. Or you might decide that afternoons are for socializing and exercising, and work late at night. I decided very early on in graduate school that weekends were for me, not for my thesis, and I think it helped me to stay sane. Many graduate students hit the doldrums around the end of the second or beginning of the third year, when they're finishing up their coursework and trying to focus in on a thesis topic. Sometimes this process can take quite a while. Try to find useful, enjoyable activities that can take your mind off of the thesis. Sing in a choir, learn a foreign language, study the history of ancient Greece, garden, or knit. If you schedule regular activities (rehearsals, tennis lessons), you will probably find it easier to avoid drifting aimlessly from day to day. In the final push to finish your thesis, though, you will almost certainly have less time for social activities than you used to. Your friends may start to make you feel guilty, whether they intend to or not. Warn them in advance that you expect to turn down lots of invitations, and it's nothing personal -- but you need to focus on your thesis for a while. Then you'll be all done and free as a bird! (Until the next phase of your life starts...) VII. Issues for Women Although this paper started out from a discussion about the problems women face in graduate school, it has evolved into something that I think is relevant for everyone, not just women. This is not to say, however, that there aren't special problems faced by women. In many cases, women and men face the same obstacles in graduate school, but react differently to them. For women, the additional factors that are sometimes (but not always) present include isolation, low self-esteem, harassment and discrimination, unusual time pressures arising from family responsibilities, lack of a support network, and lack of relevant experience. Having an unsupportive advisor can thus become much more of a problem for women than for men. I hope that to some extent, this paper will help both women and advisors of women to provide the supportive, positive environment that all graduate students deserve. Part of the reason that I changed the focus of the paper is that there have been many articles written recently on the subject of women scientists and women graduate students. These include [spertus], [toth], [hall1], [hall2], [hall3], [sandler], [nsf], [leveson], and [strok]; [mckay] talks about issues relevant for minority faculty members, many of which pertain to minority graduate students. The "systers" mailing list is an electronic resource for women in computer science; send e-mail to "systers-request@pa.dec.com" for more information. VIII. Conclusions In addition to the papers I have cited directly in the article, I found a variety of other resources to be useful, and have included them in the References section. The UC Berkeley "Graduate" is a newsletter published by the UC Berkeley Graduate Division with articles of general interest to graduate students. I found this publication very informative both during graduate school and while writing this article. A number of particularly interesting articles are included in the References section. Several articles ([bundy], [bental], [chapman]) give general advice on graduate school and doing research. Guidelines and suggestions for reviewing papers are given in [smith] and [shriver]. A number of articles on writing proposals and successfully applying for research grants are available ([somerville], [white-proposals], [white-grants], [lefferts]). Graduate school is not an easy process, and too many students are thwarted and intimidated by unsupportive or unskilled advisors, lack of knowledge about what graduate school is all about, inflexible bureaucracies, and a myriad of other obstacles. I have tried to give advice that graduate students and caring advisors can use to lessen some of these obstacles. ____________________________________________________________________________ Item #4 Closing Credits The Young Mathematicians' Network is administered by: Charles Yeomans cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Mark Winstead winstead@euclid.ucsd.edu Vic Perera vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Stephen Kennedy kennedy@stolaf.edu Neil Calkin calkin@math.gatech.edu Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu Jeff Adams adams@bright.uoregon.edu Edward Aboufadel aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu Frank Arlinghaus frank@math.ysu.edu Matt Hudelson hudelson@math.washington.edu ____________________________________________________________________________ End of Journal