CRA Career Mentoring Workshop notes

I attended the CRA Career Mentoring Workshop this week in Washington, DC. This workshop is aimed at sharing with late-stage PhD students, postdocs, and early-stage assistant professors some advice regarding how to start and succeed in an academic career. The workshop covers topics such as how to select students, how to teach and mentor students, how to get funding, how to establish a research program, etc.

Disclosure: Having been thinking about my academic career for some time, much of what was said was review for me. Below is a summary of either new things I learnt, things I already knew that were said in new light, and things that seemed especially important to me. These are by no means complete notes and will most likely be less useful to others than to myself.

Teaching:

• Make sure you teach the same course several times. The time savings are astronomical the second and third time around. Ask the chair for this.
• When teaching a class, set firm rules. For example, be explicit about what your policy is on extensions and stick to that policy. Put all these policies in the syllabus. It's better to have an explicit policy that you later realize was not ideal than to leave ambiguity in the policy.
• Idea about regrades: don't allow students to discuss regrades for 24 hours after they first see the graded item. The first reaction is anger. In 24 hours, fewer students will feel like they're entitled to argue, and those who do ask for regrades are more likely to have legitimate reasons.
• Make old exams available. They are out there anyway.
• Avoid doing things that penalize the organized, honest, and prepared. For example, don't create extensions. Don't take late work. Don't ask students not to look at old exams, etc.
• Exams should start with easy questions and get harder. Everyone should get at least something right.
• Return graded assignments and tests promptly. If it takes you two weeks to grade something, chances are you procrastinated for 13 days and then got it all done on the 14th.
• Asking students to assess how each person in a group contributed to a joint project (by % of work) is surprising reliable and precise.
• The ratio of preparation time to teaching time, when you start, can easily be 12:1.
• If possible, use a textbook with slides, tests, homeworks, etc. They do exist. These can reduce the preparation time to 3:1 or 2:1.
• First time teaching a course, keep the syllabus plan for what you will cover a little vague because you don't know if you'll hit all the topics.

Mentoring:

• Send students to conferences.
• Make students come back from conferences knowing 1 (then 3) new people. For example, tell them to talk to speakers. Have them return and tell you about these people. Maybe have them follow up with those people.

Getting Tenure:

• During the first semester as an assistant professor, meet with the chair, talk about the process, ask for written evaluations (at some point).
• When going up for tenure, your CV must have acceptance rates for conferences.
• Keep the tenure CV updated through out the career. Every trip you take. Every conference acceptance rate. Every invited talk.
• Do a pretenure tour. In the final year before tenure review, go around to strategically selected universities and give talks on your work (to potential letter writers).
• "Good" incoming students don't look like you do now; they look like you did when you entered the PhD program.

Stress Management:

• Paper deadlines and beginnings of terms are really stressful. You must take advantage of the times that are slower.
• Pay attention to how long things take and write them down so that you can accurately plan in the future.
• Spend money on problems to save yourself time. For example, pay someone to clean your house.
• Exercise, get enough sleep, eat well.

Funding:

• Call NSF program managers.
• Call before submitting to get feedback on how an idea will fly. They may tell you "if you include ..."
• Call after panel meeting (look up online when the panel meets) and ask how you did. Whereas you could get rejected, if you call, you might get seed funding.
• Write to program managers asking to be a reviewer for a specific program. Send your credentials. This is the best way to learn how to write proposals.
• Email program director one month before solicitation deadline to get on a panel.
• A grad student costs roughly $200 a day. That means buying some equipment / books / etc. is worth it! If it takes a student 3 days to figure something out online that s/he could have learnt from a $100 book in a day, just buy it.
• Bring in however much money you need to run your program, and not a penny more. Otherwise, you're spending too much time on the wrong things.
• Be able to answer the George Heilmeier's Catechism questions when talking to program managers, other professors, etc.:
  
  • What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
  • How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
  • What's new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
  • Who cares?
  • If you're successful, what difference will it make?
  • What are the risks and the payoffs?
  • How much will it cost?
  • How long will it take?
  • What are the midterm and final "exams" to check for success?

Advice on Getting Advice:

• If you know the answer to a question but just need some encouragement, keep asking for advice until you get the answer you want.

Also, Dan Grossman had a good first date last week. Wish him luck!

Survivor Bias on Career Advice

I'm blogging from the NSF CRA Career Mentoring Workshop. This workshop is aimed at [very] late term graduate students and postdocs and is supposed to mentor us on how to create an academic career: how to get an academic job, how to start a successful research program, how to mentor students, how to get funding, etc.

The topic that I choose to pick on today is survivor bias in advice on how to be successful. Laura Haas, IBM, just finished giving us a plethora of advice (that she and Dave Patterson, UC Berkeley, compiled). It was good advice. It was logical advice. Having said that, I'm skeptical. I am not just skeptical for one of the two obvious reasons: (1) retrospective advice of successful people often is aimed at the perfect world and may be far more romanticized than would be useful to a young researchers, and (2) most such advice, in my opinion, is extrapolated from a single data point of the success of a particular advice giver (e.g., I wrote a shorter-than-usual research statement and I got 10 job offers, so you should write a short one!). I am skeptical because of the survivor bias, coupled with a special kind of selective memory, that I feel affects such advice.

Such advice typically includes a list of don'ts and a shorter list of dos. For example, don't follow the least publishable units model, don't work on 20-years-out problems, do follow the scientific method to the letter. To justify this advice, the advice givers then typically apply, retrospectively, this advice to their own experience. The interesting phenomenon is that, in all the examples I've encountered, this past experience contains as many dos as don'ts. The dos, especially the noble dos, such as "work with others," and "focus on quality, not quantity in publishing," are regarded as the keys to the person's success. The don'ts, however, especially the "ignoble" don'ts, such as "generate lots of publications from a single idea," get classified as mistakes and dismissed as having put the person where he/she is today.

The real problem is that we rarely hear from unsuccessful academics, who may be able to discuss whether they actually executed more don'ts than dos, as the advice we get today would imply. In fact, it's quite possible that striving to do only the dos destroyed their academic careers. It may also be possible that having the proper ratio of dos to don'ts is what led to the success of the advice givers, and, without the don't, they would not be where they are today. There is no good way to evaluate the advice, except with some sense of morality. It seems noble to work with others, it seems noble to publish quality papers, it seems noble spend your time doing deep, meaningful reviews. It seems less so to try to publish small improvements on your previous work. So our minds have little issue accepting the premise that doing these noble things is good and what will help us succeed in our careers. But that statement is far from "executing as many dos and as few don'ts as one can will lead to success in academia."

Even if the advice givers had done lots of dos and few don't, and we could at least argue correlation, it wouldn't mean causation. (On that note, Margaret Martonosi just said "I was at the original CRA Career Mentoring Workshop, and here I am, so clearly, it works!") But we cannot. There is no evidence that what they call mistakes aren't precisely the actions that brought them success.

Point - Counterppoint

My last entry focused on the differences between UW and USC that favored the former. This post will list some things I miss about USC, though I'll try to keep the list short as to remain happy at my new job.

• The classrooms (maybe just some) have bells. Even my high school didn't have bells. It's a weird feeling, though perhaps it is part of the reason things start and end on time.
  
• No one at UW seems to know that colleges compete against one another in football. (Given the circumstances, that might be welcomed this year.)
• There is no UW bus. Possibly because there is a public transportation system, but still, no free UW bus to go around campus, housing, etc.
  
• People work regular (and standard) working hours. Folks get to work at 8:30 and leave at 5. I have 9:30 AM meetings. Last time I had a 9:30 meeting at USC had to do with getting in line for the 5PM USC / Ohio State game at the Coliseum (OK, fine, that was at 6 AM).
• Anyone may ask the state of Washington for all my email sent to and from my work address and the state has to produce it. This feels very weird.
• USC had vast programs to expand the horizons of a student beyond what he or she works on every day. For example, the Voices and Visions programs organized countless theater trips, USC sports (not Football) had free admission for students, countless organizations organized Dodgers / Angels / Lakers / Clippers / Kings / Galaxy trips, etc. I have yet to discover anything like that at UW.

Subtle differences between USC and UW

I started a new job as a postdoc at the University of Washington. I've been here for a week now and have noticed a few subtle differences between UW and USC (at least some of which may be due to the small sample size of my observation). I am particularly focusing on the differences that favor UW in this post, so if you are affiliated with USC, don't get upset. Just remember that I am wearing four layers today, at least one of which is waterproof, and am using the warmest blanket I own at night. And it's only the start of October.

• Talks:
  
  • The talks I have attended at UW have been of better quality than those at USC.
  • Faculty attend talks. Numerous faculty.
  • Students attend talks.
  • Talks and meetings start and end when they are supposed to end. I cannot remember the last time I attended a 60-minute meeting for less than 90 minutes at USC.
  
  
• Atmosphere:
  
  • Where at USC stands a statue of Tommy Trojan, at UW stands a larger-than-life statue of George Washington.
  • Faculty have no problem wearing t-shirts. I don't remember seeing that at USC.
  • I've seen students knit at talks. Also, wearing StarTrek costumes to work doesn't seem to be out of the question.
  • Faculty and staff email other faculty and staff (as in the entire faculty and staff lists) daily with things like "My student got a job," or "Good talk coming up tomorrow," or "Good talk in 20 minutes," or "Good talk starting now," or "Does anyone know of a good plumber in the area?"
  • The campus-alert emails say things like "Male suspects asked the victims for pizza and when refused became agitated," instead of "Shooting on campus." (I kid you not! Pizza! The email's subject was "attempted robbery.")
• Support:
  
  • There is ample technical support. If you email them with a problem, they come over and fix it. They set up equipment. They have extra mice, keyboards, speakers, etc. in case yours break.
  • There is ample administrative support. They are fast. They are friendly. They are not nearly as overworked (because there are many of them) at UW as they are at USC, making them both more helpful and happier!
  • Every first-year students gets a department laptop or desktop when s/he arives.
  • There is ample access to printers (b/w, color, duplex, transparency, large-format), fax machines, copy machines, etc.
  • There are supplies easily available to set up your office, mail things, etc.
  • There is free coffee, tea, and microwave and fridge access available to all grad students, staff, and faculty.
  • There are no personalized keys. Faculty keys open all offices (including all other faculty). Student keys open all student offices but not faculty offices.

Tom Mitchell's research

Today, I attended Tom Mitchell's talk. This was perhaps the best research I have seen in 6-7 years. If you have a moment, I encourage you to take a look at his paper summarizing this work.

In short, they found that when a person thinks about some noun, some parts of that person's brain get increased blood flow. It turns out that:
1. The parts of YOUR brain that increase blood flow are so similar to the parts of MY brain that increase blood flow, that I can build a machine learner to learn what brain states map to what nouns based on YOUR brain and then be able to predict what nouns I am thinking about based on pictures of MY brain.
2. By looking at what verbs are most commonly used (on the Internet) in combination with a set of nouns, taking proportional linear combinations of brain pictures for certain nouns allows correct predictions of brain pictures for other nouns.

Push vs. Pull advising

Over the years, I've had several academic advisors and mentors. I've noticed that one of the dimension among which such advisors can be classified is what I call the push vs. pull dimension that measures the method by which they collect information about their advisees. In the extremes, a push advisor waits for a student to come to him or her with a report of progress or a problem, and only then evaluates the information and advises, while a pull advisor checks with the student on a regular basis (e.g., at a weekly one-on-one meeting), collects information, and advises.

My observation, that I put up for debate here, is that the majority of academic advisors are primarily pull advisors who employ push mechanisms when it seems appropriate. I claim that a better advisor is, instead, one who is primarily a push advisor, employing pull mechanisms when appropriate.

It is unlikely that any one advisor is completely push (e.g., if a student, for months, doesn't produce any results, questions, or thoughts, the advisor is sure to inquire what's going on) or completely pull (at times, e.g., around deadlines, weekly, or even daily updates are insufficient, and the advisor needs to know right away when the student finishes a task). However, in my experience, the majority of academic advisors are primarily pull advisors, trying to guide progress via holding weekly individual meetings with each student.

Push and pull mechanisms are not new to engineers and thus we know some of their advantages and disadvantages. In particular, pull mechanisms are inefficient when the frequency of updates is erratic. If a student sometimes finishes tasks daily but has to wait up to a week to discuss the progress with the advisor before making future progress, much time is wasted. On the other hand, frequent push updates can render the advisor unable to multitask and, among other tasks, advise multiple students. The main flaw with pull advising is that it affects the student's schedule and planning practices: as many students are are deadline-driven creatures, if faced with weekly meetings, each tasks tends to occupy one week, regardless of its difficulty. A task's completion time should be independent of the pull schedule, and the student should be able to seek advice when it is necessary, not when the clock strikes seven [days]. Thus, an advisor should be a push advisor, switching to pulling only when (1) pushing is so frequent that it interferes with progress or (2) pushing is so infrequent that it indicates the misuse of the student's resources.

The misuse of blogs

As I write my first entry in this blog I wonder how it is that I have gotten to having a blog. I have, and have been vocal about, several major objections to the existence of blogs. For the most part, they all stem from the categorical misuse of blogs by other entities; for example, newspapers and other news sources citing random things said by random people in blogs as evidence, giving them a weight disproportionate to what they are. Typically, a blog entry is just someone's thoughts and opinions, and not hard evidence. (Note that thoughts and opinions are evidence of something, just typically not of what those thoughts and opinions claim.)

The idea that blogs are collections of thoughts and opinions brings me to my next point, and an argument that blogs are misused. While we all have many thoughts and many opinions, I would be surprised if even the most influential people had more than, say, a couple thoughts and opinions per week that were worth sharing with others. Those who keep a "daily newsletter" or write in their blogs more frequently than weekly simply shift the responsibility of weeding out the important nuggets of information onto the readers.

Thus, I vow to average no more than one post per week in this blog, and, significantly more importantly, to try to distill what I say to information that others may actually find interesting and helpful.

Having said all that, the purpose of this blog is to describe the experience of a young researcher (currently a postdoc in computer science at USC) as he goes through his quest to become an impactful and successful academic. As such, I will post on issues related to academia, research, computer science and mathematics, and general university policies. Knowing myself, a few entries on the Red Sox, and perhaps ultimate frisbee, will sneak into this blog as well.