tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80673545708753446762024-02-20T08:43:34.668-06:00It's AcademicThoughts and advice from Prof. Brian T. Cunningham, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-17278545338184445292014-08-12T13:11:00.000-05:002014-08-12T13:11:02.468-05:00Get a Life!<div class="MsoNormal">
Get a Life!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The importance of having some interests besides work, even
in grad school<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I meet with students for their mandatory undergraduate
advisor meeting or with prospective graduate students, I like to ask the
question: “What do you do for fun?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Partly, the question helps students to relax and talk about something
that they enjoy and know a lot about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The question also gives me some insight into someone’s personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you a bungie-jumper, a novel-reader, a
pianist, a soccer player, a nature-lover, or something else entirely?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you as passionate about your pastime as
you are about your career?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you
trying to find a way to get your engineering interests and hobby interests to
intersect?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I have found by asking
about people’s interests outside the context of school is that a great many
talented people are multi-faceted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
can be great at more than one thing, should they choose to put their energies
in a particular direction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve also
found that all people need an escape from the work of their official career, no
matter how much they might enjoy their career interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even people who I thought were complete
workaholics turn out to have some activities that they enjoy immensely, even if
they try to keep them secret to maintain the illusion that all they do is work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The challenge in life is to work hard at what you are
working at, but to understand that when you have too much of a good thing, the
enjoyment of it diminishes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
research, engineering, and teaching activities, you will actually be better at
what you are doing when you can have a positive attitude about it, and not be
exhausted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if work is your highest
priority, it still makes sense to take some time away from it to do something
else you enjoy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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I will use myself as an example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My students sometimes tell me that they do
not want to be a professor, because they look at me and think I work too
hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Truthfully, most any job with some
level of responsibility is going to demand that you work hard, and sometimes
put in some periods of long hours, so that’s not a great excuse for not being a
professor!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Early in my career, I was
afraid of becoming a one-dimensional person who only worked, so I have always
put some emphasis on doing things outside of work. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are not too many things on TV that I
like to watch, so I have always looked for something more enjoyable to do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First, I have a lovely wife and two great daughters, so I
have been especially fortunate in life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Together with my wife, raising children through their stages of infant,
baby, toddler, kid, tween, and teenager is not really a hobby, but it has been
an endless source of joy, frustration, silliness, seriousness, free
entertainment, and expensive expenses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While it was not easy to have many hobbies while our children were very
young, I always made a point of getting some exercise every day (usually at my
lunch hour), and I never, ever gave up my love of video games.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My wife was nice enough to let me take time
to train for long-distance cycling on weekend mornings, and to put up with many
evenings when I was saving the universe from some form of evil via video games.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If video games are not geeky enough for you (as an
electrical engineer, I feel it is important to enjoy the fruits of the
profession!), I am also a fan of science fiction books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I usually only get a chance to read entire
novels during semester breaks or vacation, but I usually have anthologies of
short stories to read when I just have a few minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have enjoyed photography since I was a
photographer for my high school newspaper, where I got to learn how to develop
film and to make prints in a darkroom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I combine my cycling hobby and work travel with photography by bringing
my nice camera along on trips where I’m going somewhere cool, and taking city
or nature photos.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I print and frame some
of the best ones to decorate our house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Several years ago, when I started having so many management
responsibilities that I could not get into the lab to build things with my own
hands, I took up woodworking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I taught
myself how to use a table saw, a band saw, a router, a drill press, … with the
purpose of making furniture for my house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Although it would have been WAY cheaper to just buy furniture, I love
making things out of solid wood that will last for generations (hopefully)!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s also fun to make a huge amount of noise
and big piles of sawdust in the process of turning a pile of wood into a
beautiful desk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I like it because it is
the exact opposite of nanotechnology.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Two years ago, during a sabbatical, I decided to take up
piano (after having taken lessons in high school, and then quit when I got to
college).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Piano is the hardest hobby of
all, since my progress is SO SLOW.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, when I am practicing piano, I cannot really think about
anything else, and I like it when eventually a song starts to sound halfway
decent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not think I have ever
played any song from start to finish without making a mistake, and I know that
I drive my family crazy with my repetitive practicing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I practice nearly every day that I am not
traveling, and have a lesson every week to keep me motivated.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, if you look at me as an example of someone who has been
steadily been working pretty hard and having a successful career, you can see
that I do a lot of stuff besides work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Your own interests will be different, but it is important to make the
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes some good research ideas
occur to me while I am out in the middle of nowhere on my bike, but sometimes I
do not think about anything at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Maybe the piano playing helps my brain somehow, but all I am really hoping
for is to be halfway decent by the time I turn 70. The video games have
absolutely no redeeming social value, but I really enjoy the graphics, sounds,
and plots of games – especially compared to the old Atari and Nintendo that I
had as a kid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My Xbox Live name is
Professor BC and I’ll kick your butt at Halo!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-30797667288011412822014-07-18T11:55:00.004-05:002014-07-18T11:55:52.329-05:00The Ten Commandments of Graduate School<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
The Ten Commandments of Graduate
School<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
These were not handed down to me
on stone tablets by God, but the following short pieces of advice will serve
you well for a successful stint in graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few commandments have corollaries, which is
a useful feature that was not used in the original Ten Commandments.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
1. Focus on your research, even at
the expense of your classroom performance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Employers will care most about your research accomplishments and not
your GPA.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
Put a very high priority upon getting
your journal manuscripts into a state of completion<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
2. Come well-prepared for all
meetings with your advisor and to group meetings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Be ready to show your data and have some
ideas in mind for the next steps.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
3. Treat your research as you would
treat a full-time job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Show up at lab
every morning, and consistently put in a full day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Try not to work from home very
often.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody can interact with you
there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Save your time at home for
recreation and homework.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
4. Share <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> your results with your advisor – both the experiments that went
as expected, and also the areas that are giving you problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your advisor cannot give advice if you hide
the things that did not go well.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
5. Work hard at developing your
writing and speaking skills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lack of
these skills will hold back your career if you do not improve them now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Practice is the key.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
6. Be respectful of University staff
people (laboratory engineers, grants/contracts personnel, administrative
assistants, purchasing agents).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The way
you treat them gets back to your advisor and other faculty, who will write
recommendation letters based on their knowledge of your interpersonal behavior.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
7. Make an effort to get to know
faculty besides your advisor through co-advising arrangements, your classes,
and informal discussions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
8. Make an effort to be on excellent
terms with the other members of your research group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Be willing to be mentored by the senior
students, and be ready to serve as an excellent teacher for new students in the
group.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
Seek out discussions with other
students (outside your group too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Listen
to their ideas and respect their views.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Do not be condescending or dismissive of others.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
9. Do not ever find yourself with
nothing to work on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Always have a side
project or two to work on, should another project become stalled.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in;">
Be self-motivated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actively seek out solutions to your problems,
rather than expect your advisor to always tell you what to do.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
10. Set aside time every day to read
journal articles, selected based on your own personal interests, even if the
reading is outside your thesis topic.<o:p></o:p></div>
Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-43850373736032737002014-04-17T20:53:00.002-05:002014-04-17T20:53:19.461-05:00Characteristics of the Worst Graduate Students<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In a previous blog post, I talked
about what the characteristics of the best graduate students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what about the “bad” ones?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Around the dinner table at home, my wife and
children are probably most familiar with stories surrounding the students who
cause me the most anxiety, and in fact, if you asked my 15-year-old daughter,
she could tell you the names of my three least favorite graduate students of
all time!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So in the interest of
completeness, I would like to share with you the personality traits and
behaviors that lead to a lack of success in graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will not give any names or enough
information to identify a particular person, but if you are reading this and
recognize the characteristics in yourself, you may need to do some
self-analysis!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I’ll start by saying how fortunate
I have been to work with so many truly outstanding and inspirational graduate
students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are young people who are
innovative, self-starting, hard-working, honest, collaborative, optimistic,
aspirational, and hungry for success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Those characteristics truly describe 90-95% of all the graduate students
that I have ever advised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are the
people who are thoughtful, show up for work every day, get results, communicate
their results/problems/questions regularly, get along with others, and in
general don’t give me something exciting to talk about at the dinner table when
my wife asks me how my day was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(For
example:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wife: “Brian, how was your
day?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Me: “Oh, pretty good!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Leo got some great results in the lab today,
and one of Meng’s papers just got accepted in a really tough journal.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My Kids (in my dreams): “Dad, how
incredible!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tell us more about how you
helped cure cancer today?!?!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My Kids
(in reality): “How boring! Can we change the subject to something besides Dad’s
work?!?”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The really interesting dinner conversations
occur when one of outlier students is doing something incredibly annoying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over the course of 10 years as a professor,
there have probably been ~3 students who failed due to problems they brought upon
themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of them will ever have
a PhD thesis with my signature on it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So, how does a person get on this list?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don’t come in to work</i>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It’s simple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are not at the lab, you cannot get any
research done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have had students who I
would rarely ever see, even though my office door was only 15 feet away from
their desk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During normal work hours, I
would never see them in the lab.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I
stopped by the office at night or the weekend, I could not find them
either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I meet with them every
week, and ask what they did, they would have very little to show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before long, I would give them a lecture
about how they need to treat graduate school like a serious job, and not just a
hobby between classes that they dabble in when they feel like it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some students have a hard time making the
transition from classwork to research, and come up with a lot of excuses not to
make it to lab.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Another serious problem is someone
who treats graduate school like they work at a bank.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students in this category come into lab at
10AM, take 90 minutes for lunch, and then go to the gym for a 5PM workout,
followed by dinner. It sounds like a lovely day to me, but these students are
making progress at an incredibly slow rate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Really, a person should be trying to work between 8-10 hours per day in
graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some people will do
more than this for some stretches for a critical experiment or a deadline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fact is, when you get out into any job in
Industry or Academia, you will be working at least this much (but getting paid
a lot more), and you need to build good work habits while in graduate
school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try coming into work at 8AM,
working until noon, taking an hour for lunch, and then stay at work until
6PM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are focused while at work,
you will get a ton done, and still have time to sleep, eat, exercise, and see
your friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
While there are some tasks for
which you may be more effective somewhere besides the lab (like reading
journals, writing, preparing figures…) it is best to try to schedule these
activities while you are at work, and to have the philosophy of focusing on
work while you are at work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can
manage your time better by setting some time aside every day when your mind is
sharp to do some reading or writing, but avoid doing it at home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A lot of what happens in research involves
interacting with other people, and others (like your advisor) being able to
find you for questions and discussion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
advice is to try avoiding being a nocturnal person (like a vampire) who works
from 10PM to 8AM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My students who tell
me that they do this seem to be a lot less productive than those who expose
themselves to daylight.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Come into work, but don’t work:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
was once a student in my group who I would see at his desk very consistently,
but he seemed to never get much work done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Week after week I would meet with him, and it seemed like whatever
progress he had to report to me could have been done in just a couple of
hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day, out of curiosity, I
walked up behind him at his desk to see what he was working on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was he reading journal papers, researching
some information to help him solve a problem, emailing his mother?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, it was Facebook!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Basically, every time I saw his computer
screen after that, he was spouting nonsense to his friends back in his home
country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He made the mistake of
friending me, so I unfortunately got exposed to all the various posts made
throughout the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My advice: save the video
games and social media playtime for outside the office, and focus on work while
you are at work.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
a similar vein, another student always seemed to be on the phone during
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There may have been some kind of
complex family situation, a side business, or something that required a lot of
loud arguments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed impossible to
have a 30-minute meeting with this student without his cellphone sounding off
several times, and he was constantly running out of group meeting to answer
calls (or doing text messages while another student was speaking at group
meeting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very rude.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once again, my advice is to be engaged at
work while you are at work, and do not treat the lab as a place to do a lot of
personal business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes it is
necessary, but it should be the exception, and not the rule.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Refuse to work with other people:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
once had a student whose philosophy was that he should be able to accomplish
everything in his thesis work without the input of anybody else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He felt that asking one of the senior
students in the group for advice was a sign of weakness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This person had such problems interacting
with other people that it was necessary for me to hold weekly sub-group
meetings in which I had a written matrix of tasks and assigned “finish-by”
dates, so he could not agree to do something and then wriggle out of it
later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This person found himself
rediscovering things that people in my group already figured out years before,
finding out everything the hard way, and not making any real progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People also learned that they could never
rely on him for lending a hand with anything, and so eventually they stopped
asking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This student found himself
completely isolated from the group, and unable to duplicate results that others
were able to achieve easily because they took the time to ask questions that
enabled them to learn how to build and measure things correctly.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Antagonize your fellow group members, so all of them refuse to work
with you:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An
antagonistic personality will also serve to isolate a student from the rest of
the group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have had a small number of
students who had an attitude of superiority that led them to not only question
the work of other students, but to belligerently accuse them of being wrong,
and to insinuate that their projects were not worthy of serious time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These students would engage in prolonged and
aggressive questioning of other students during group meeting that would extend
into heated arguments during the rest of the week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Interestingly, the students with this attitude
were also those who had the least to show in the way of their own
accomplishments, and also the least amount of background knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While a certain amount of questioning and
challenging is a good thing, these students could never let things go, and would
conduct their questions in a manner that was seen as threatening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After a while, the senior students and
postdocs in the group just stopped listening to them, or offering them any
advice that they could have benefited from in their own project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My advice to students is to ask plenty of
questions, but conduct yourself in a gracious manner if you want your fellow
group members to be helpful collaborators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rudeness and aggressiveness rarely gets you the results you want with
your co-workers in any context.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Antagonize students in groups I collaborate with, so their groups
refuse to work with my group:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By
now, you might realize that the same people that I was referring to in the last
section could not limit their rudeness impulses to people in their own research
group, but indiscriminately extended their approach to whomever they
encountered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately this also
included students from other professors who I collaborated with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I ended up having to apologize to the
offended faculty and student in the other group, and chose other students with
more pleasant dispositions to collaborate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Collaborations are really important to a faculty member, so students
should take it upon themselves to try hard to make them work, rather than get
into fights that the faculty have to straighten out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Break things by being stupid, and fail to take part in fixing them:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
one of the most egregious examples of incompetence that I have ever
encountered, a visiting postdoc managed to completely destroy a $750K piece of
equipment the very first time he laid hands on it without someone carefully
watching his actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How did he manage
to do this?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He underwent training, and
was taught all the ways that he could incur serious damage, but apparently none
of the training lodged itself into his brain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>During the first time he was allowed to operate the equipment solo, he
encountered an unexpected message.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rather than stop what he was doing and ask the experienced person what
to do, he put the machine into “manual” mode, and just seemed to start pressing
buttons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>30 minutes later, the machine
was ruined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was worse, several
other people needed to spend many hours to repair the damage, but this person
did not offer his time or assistance in any of the work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This postdoc’s behavior (in this instance and
other related ones related to safety) got him permanently banned from the lab.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Get banned from the lab:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
you are banned from the lab, it is very hard to make research progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The person mentioned above actually got
banned from another lab for breaking yet another piece of equipment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think he is the only person to ever be
permanently banned from two labs at Illinois.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I ended up having to pay for all his damage from my grant funding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After that, this person spent the rest of his
postdoc in his office surfing the internet, and never first-authored a paper
with my group.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blame all your problems on everything except yourself:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sometimes,
when things are not going well, people seek to identify the source of their
problems. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Problems are not hard to find,
and some common ones are:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
“My advisor did not tell me
exactly what to do.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
“My equipment did not work.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
“I did not get the result I
expected.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
“I did not know how to perform a
technique.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
“I needed some piece of equipment,
and I did not have it.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
“I did not know what other people
already knew about this topic.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
“My classes are giving me too much
homework this semester.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
One of the most important
characteristics of successful researchers is resourcefulness, and this is a very
important lesson to learn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Your advisor will not likely be
able to tell you every single detail of how you will perform your experiment,
or give you a bulleted list that will tell you, from start to finish, every
step you will need to perform to complete your thesis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be up to you to get input and
direction from your advisor, but to use your resourcefulness to fill in the
rest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not sure what to do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then talk with some other members of your
group, and develop a written plan that you can review with your advisor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a piece of equipment does not work, you
may need to get into it, and discover how to fix it or get it repaired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t know how to perform a technique?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may need to take a class, attend a
workshop, or get someone to show you how to do it correctly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Need a key piece of equipment?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Try to figure out who might have it on
campus, figure out how to get one on loan, or find one for your advisor to buy
on EBay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not sure how others have
approached this problem in the past?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Go
to Google Scholar and read up on some published scientific literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are spending all your time on
classwork, your priorities need an adjustment, or you need to structure your
day so you can keep making steady research progress.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Certainly
a graduate student cannot solve every problem, but considering that you are
among the most intelligent and highly educated people in the entire country, it
is expected that you will take initiative to aggressively identify and solve
problems on your own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Science is hard,
and this is part of the learning experience!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fail to draft a paper on your research:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
most problematic students that I have advised are also those who never
completed a project from start to finish with sufficient attention to detail
and thorough understanding to prepare a manuscript that was of high enough
quality to submit to a peer reviewed scientific journal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For these students, there was always a lack
of understanding of what had been published by others previously, a failure to
listen to my suggestions for what experiments would lead to convincing
arguments about their hypothesis, or just a failure to follow though on what
they started. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Need to know EVERYTHING before you can do ANYTHING:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
issue can trip up people who are perfectionists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes, it is indeed useful, when
encountering something that does not meet with the expected result, to revisit
the fundamentals, simplify the experiment, and tease out the variable that may
have been giving an undesired effect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, when it becomes necessary to take this approach for absolutely
every element of a project, it becomes an impediment for achieving the goal at
hand. For example: I need to completely understand all polymer chemistry and
biophysics before I can use this epoxy material in the construction of my
device!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another example:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I need to take the highest level classes in
electromagnetics and quantum mechanics before I can consider how to fabricate
this device for performing surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One particular student kept finding places
and reasons to return to the fundamentals without ever making much practical
progress on the stated goal of reproducing and optimizing a device that had
already been working in the lab for two years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Typically, people can gather information on the fundamentals while
simultaneously making practical progress in the lab.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a parallel process rather than a serial
one.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So,
that’s my advice on how to avoid becoming one of the graduate students who your
advisor will lament daily at the dinner table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You will find that a collegial attitude towards your fellow students, a
philosophy of treating your lab research like you would treat a “real” job,
being careful not to carelessly break expensive stuff, some self-motivation,
and ability to make progress despite the lack of perfect conditions will take
you a long way in graduate school and in life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Good luck!!!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 4.5pt;">
<br /></div>
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Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-82337837424963531732013-07-10T07:10:00.004-05:002013-07-10T07:10:21.942-05:00Gaining Attention for Your Research - The Art of Self Promotion
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<br />
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Brian T. Cunningham<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
July, 2013<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
If you are considering a career in
academic research, you should know that competition for the attention of your
peers, industry, funding agencies, and the public is fierce. There are now such a large number of
scientific journals, conferences, and other sources for information competing
for our time and attention, that nobody can possibly keep up with all of
them. However, when your case comes up
for promotion or tenure, your department head is going to be requesting letters
of recommendation from senior people in your field, asking how good your work
is, and how it compares to other people at the same stage of their career. How can you increase the chances that people
(besides your parents) know about your research? You can be sure that your department head and
Dean care deeply that their faculty are developing reputations as the leaders
in their fields of research, since that impacts the reputation (and rankings)
of the whole institution. So, by
promoting yourself, you are actually doing an important service to your school
– so don’t be shy about it!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
However, “self-promotion” sounds so
unseemly! It is like, as researchers, we
are snake-oil salesmen/saleswomen from the old American West, except we
ourselves are the snakeoil. Very few
faculty have a publicity department, so if we don’t help get the word out about
our research, nobody else is going to do it.
Part of doing excellent science is participating in the scientific
community, which you cannot do if you simply stay in the lab, never telling
anyone about your work. So what does it
mean to “promote” yourself, and how can you do it effectively. Is it possible to overdo it?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The first and most important aspect
of self-promotion is to begin by doing excellent scientific work. Are you working on a problem that is
significant? Does your work have
applications or implications for things that would make it interesting to the
public? Are you doing something unique
or demonstrating an exciting capability for the first time? In your research, can you clearly demonstrate
how your approach works, and without a doubt, claim that it is performing in a
particular way? If you were to go to
your next big family reunion, and if someone asked you what you do, what is it
that you could tell them, so they would understand why your work is exciting? Working on an important problem and being
able to describe why it is important to people who are not experts in your
technology is half of the battle. The other
half is getting other people to know what you do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The most common methods that people
use to get the word out about their work is to publish in scientific journals
and to give talks at scientific meetings.
If you are consistently targeting the journals in your field with the
best impact factors, and giving your talks at both large meetings with a broad
range of attendees, and at small conferences that bring in the best experts in
a narrow sub-field, there is a good chance that people will start getting
familiar with what you do. However,
academic “fame” takes a while to build for most people. There are so many scientific conferences and
so many scientific journals that you cannot expect even every specialist in
your field to know about your work right away.
So as you continue your project and continue making new advancements,
you may consider publishing in journals that enable you to focus on different
aspects of your work, and giving talks at conferences that serve slightly
different communities. In your
conference presentations, you should definitely highlight your previously
published work, and give references to it.
Your new papers might mention previous work that you did on the same
topic, referencing your papers from 1-2 years ago. This way, people will get a sense that you
are building a significant body of work, and you make it easy for them to find
your results, even if published in a journal that they do not read regularly.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
You should also have a
well-organized web site that describes your research, and briefly discussed its
importance in terms that a nonscientist can understand. Include plenty of highlight images, and links
to your papers, so readers who find your web site can also find your papers
easily. While this is now common practice
for faculty, even graduate students can do this.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
One way to get your research
noticed by more people is to have it featured on the cover of the scientific
journal it is published in. The secret
to getting a “cover article” is not necessarily to have the best or most
important paper in the issue. The key is
actually to create an interesting-looking image in the course of the research,
that makes use of microscope photos, computer simulation results, or a conceptual
diagram. Sometimes, people use the art department
at their organization to make images that are colorful and interesting, if not
scientifically informative. When you
receive notification that your paper was accepted for publication, send the
journal editor your candidate cover image, and ask if they would consider using
it for the issue that your paper will publish in. Since few people go through all the extra
work to create candidate cover images, your image is likely to be
selected. Not only does the cover image
give you something nice to frame and put on your office wall, but you can
highlight it to your department and colleagues, as if you are the MVP of the
Superbowl, and made it to the cover of Sports Illustrated! I have noticed that a lot more people are
aware of papers that we published this way, since many people browse through
the journal table of contents, and click on whatever looks interesting. Being on the cover puts your paper in front
of ~20-50 others, and you can feel famous for a week or a month, until the next
issue comes out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
When your research group has an
important breakthrough and publishes it, it can be a great idea to let your
department or college publicity department know about it. If it looks interesting to them, they might
send someone over to interview you and your students, and to write a short
article about your work. These articles
find their way to alumni newsletters, and home page highlights – but often a
press release issued by a university will be picked up by other news
organizations. The people who write technology
sections of major newspapers, technology web sites, and trade journals are
constantly trolling for stories about technical developments that are new,
interesting, and that have broad potential for the field or for the
public. So even if you don’t know the
editors of major newspapers or trade magazines, you can make yourself easier to
find through the publicity department of your university. You should definitely make friends with them,
and help their staff writers draft accurate and interesting stories about your
work. This is also a great opportunity
for graduate students to get some publicity.
Always include their names in the stories and include them in any photos
or videos. After all, they are the ones
doing the lab work and solving all the problems. I know of instances in which the only person ever
mentioned in the lab publicity is the professor, as if he/she is a lone genius
who made everything happen, as if by magic.
People notice this, and label the faculty as greedy for publicity. The same idea about publicity applies if you
or one of your students is awarded with some kind of special recognition. You should definitely let your department
know when someone has won a best poster award, best paper award, or a major
competitive fellowship. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Is it possible to promote yourself
too much? It’s a hard question to
answer. I know of faculty whose every
journal paper is an act of self-promotion, who put at least as much effort into
the photographs and cover art as they put into the scientific data. I know of faculty who insist on creating a
big press release for nearly every paper, and get front-page treatment for
every grant award, license agreement, or other routine events. I have seen examples of faculty to
breathlessly claim to be on the path to curing blindness, making Harry Potter
invisibility cloaks, and making autonomous nano-robots that will navigate
through your arteries, cleaning out the plaque.
I have even seen research centers with goals that seem to imply that they
will do away with death itself! I have
seen major faculty who rarely ever mention the contributions of their graduate
students and postdocs. Another trend in
recent years has been to take ordinary items, and to make them “smart” by
incorporating some technology within them.
Examples include “smart” bandaids, tattoos, surgical gloves, noses, and
even bricks!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The temptation to over-exaggerate
the importance of one’s research may seem overwhelming, especially since the
examples I cited above all come from investigators who have been incredibly
successful in winning research grants, chaired professorships, and technical
society awards. At some level, selling
themselves as having a big vision, even if several miracles would need to occur
in order to make the big vision come true, makes them seem important and
farsighted. On the other hand, I know
that many people who recognize such proclamations as empty marketing, and grow
annoyed when reality does not come close to matching the rhetoric. However, I would say that this group is
comprised of people who are technically very knowledgeable, and therefore in
the minority. Most people cannot tell
when something that sounds spashy and exciting is the real thing.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
So my advice on self-promotion is to
do it, but to not over-do it. Save your
attempts for garnering publicity for the instances that truly merit it, while
making sure to keep performing and communicating excellent science our
technical colleagues. Keep your
extrapolations of your technical work to a realistic level, but be mindful of
how you might adapt your work to make a contribution to a larger vision. Hopefully, in this way, you will gain the
respect and trust of your colleagues, let the wider world that you are working
on something exciting, and to be able to deliver on the promise of your work.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-78545528145071754782013-05-31T08:47:00.004-05:002013-05-31T08:47:49.231-05:00What exactly do professors DO all day?
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What exactly do professors DO all day?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Brian T. Cunningham</div>
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May 31, 2013</div>
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When I was a graduate student, I knew that my advisor did
not spend much of his time in the office, or even on campus. When I hear our state representatives
complaining about how professors are paid so much to work only 3 hours per week
(the hours that we teach class), I have to cringe at their ignorance of how
faculty members really spend their time.
So to give you an idea of what a typical “day in the life” of a
professor includes, in this blog I will describe what I’m typically up to. I hope it does not sound like complaining,
but it’s good for students considering the academic life to understand that
it’s not all fun and glory – there are a lot of responsibilities and work that
does not get much attention to go along with the fun parts – just like with
most any job.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Teaching</i>. During a typical semester, I am responsible
for teaching one 3-hour class. While
this takes three hours of actual lecturing in front of the class, I spend a lot
more time in addition to this. It takes
me approximately eight hours to prepare a single one-hour lecture for the first
time. This includes the time I spend
researching the topic, gathering and understanding the source materials,
preparing lecture notes, making vugraphs look pretty, and reviewing/revising it
to make sure the whole thing makes logical sense, and to make sure that I
understand everything in it completely.
If I have lectured on the same topic in a previous semester, I will
still spend ~90 minutes per lecture to makes updates/revisions, and to study
the lecture material to refresh and reload my brain. I’ll do most of my lecture preparation for
the week during the preceding weekend.
Before the semester starts, I’ll try to get ~50% of the homework
assignments figured out. With the help
of the TA, I will create new questions, go through a couple rounds of revisions
to balance length and difficulty level, and work out the solutions. Each homework probably takes 3-4 hours total
to create. I prefer to create and grade
my exams without input from the TA, so I have a clear idea of how the students
are doing. My preference lately has been
to give a large number of short and simple quizzes, which are easier to create
and grade than open-ended calculation questions, so each bi-weekly quiz takes
~90 minutes to make, and another 2 hours to grade. After factoring in office hours (~ 2
hours/week) and other administrative stuff related to teaching, that 3-hour
class probably takes ~12-16 hours/week.
While this is the level of effort for a 400-level class with ~40
students, teaching a big sophomore-level class takes much more because office
hours are in very high demand, creating exams requires collaboration with other
faculty, grading is much more elaborate, and there are always students who need
extra help. <o:p></o:p></div>
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So, since teaching nominally only took 2 days out of my
week, I should have tons of time left over to go bowling at the Union,
exercising at the gym, and playing video games, right? Wrong!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Committees</i>: To run an academic department, there are
committees for everything, and their activities can take very large chunks of
time during intense periods. For
example, this semester I am on the committee for hiring new faculty in the ECE
Department, the curriculum committee for ECE, and the committee to hire a new
Department Head for the Bioengineering Department. Committees meet to determine what questions
will be asked of each candidate, to review and discuss the qualifications of
applicants, to decide on who to invite, to meet individually and as a group with
each candidate, to listen to the candidate seminars, to discuss the inputs of
everyone on how well the candidate performed on their interview visit, and to
decide which candidates should receive a job offer. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I have served on the UIUC Faculty Senate, the committee that
reviews student candidates for fellowships and scholarships, the committee that
decides which faculty will receive special recognition for their teaching, the
committee that reviews applicants for admission to graduate school, and the College
of Engineering Executive committee.
However, there are many, many more!
Usually, a faculty member will serve on ~2-3 committees each semester,
and their duties will rotate every year.
Since I am a member of the ECE Department and the Bioengineering
Department, I unfortunately have double the number of committee meetings to
attend. These responsibilities can take
between 1-8 hours/week, although it drops to zero during the summer.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Reviewing Stuff:</i> I spend an extraordinary amount of time
reviewing things. Since I serve on an
NIH review panel, I am responsible for reviewing 10 proposals for each of three
meetings per year. Each proposal has a
“core” section that is 7-13 pages long, but each proposal also incorporates a
lot of other information (investigator biographies, support letters, lab
facility description, budgets…) that bring each proposal to ~75-100 pages. Reading each proposal takes me at least two
hours, and sometimes more if I have to perform extra reading of published
papers to get a good understanding of what is being proposed and to understand
prior work. It takes me another 1-2
hours to write each review, so 10 proposals takes me ~40 hours of work. In addition to that, I have to travel to
another city for a 2-day closed-door review meeting, where a group of ~25
scientists discuss ~90 proposals that includes the 10 that I was responsible
for. So NIH proposal reviewing consumes
8x3 = 24 workdays per year. In reality,
I spread out my reviewing so it is only 2 hours per day during the weeks
leading up to the meeting, so I do not go review-crazy. I can only hold so much information in my
head at one time, so I like to read a proposal on one day, and then write my
review for it during the two following days.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Although I spend most of my proposal-reviewing activities
for NIH, since I also receive funding from NSF, I typically participate in one
more review panels on their behalf. The
workload is typically the same (10 proposals + a trip to NSF in Washington,
DC). However, that is not the end of my
proposal reviewing responsibilities.
Very often, I’m asked to review batches of proposals that are internally
submitted within our campus, or other one-off proposals where a colleague at
another school has solicited my written opinion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But wait, that’s not all.
Scientific journals require a pretty rigorous review process. If you think about it, every paper that is
submitted requires an average of 3 reviewers.
Since my research group is usually submitting 10-15 journal papers each
year, that means we are generating a need for 30-45 reviews/year. Karma dictates, therefore, that my group and
I should be reviewing 30-45 papers from other people every year. If I am very busy reviewing proposals, and I
am requested to review a paper on a topic that one of my senior students is
very familiar with, I will suggest that the paper be forwarded to my student
for review. However, I still end up
reviewing ~20-25 journal manuscripts myself every year. Actually, the good ones are interesting to
read and easy to review, so it is not necessarily a painful duty. However, I have seen a lot of poorly written,
incomplete, non-novel, or incomprehensible papers too. I refuse to correct grammar or spelling,
except to tell the author that it needs more attention. Reading a paper and writing a thorough review
for it typically takes me ~2-3 hours.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Recommendation Letter
Writing:</i> Students and faculty are in
constant need of reference letters for admission to graduate school,
consideration for a fellowship, consideration for promotion/tenure, getting a
job, obtaining “Fellow” status in their technical society, and every other
imaginable recognition. It’s just how
the world rolls: nobody wants to make a decision without at least three
“famous” people endorsing the decision. When
I worked in Industry, nobody ever wanted my opinion, but now that I am a
professor, people seem to think that a positive word from me will be the key
thing that pushes them to the top of the pile!
After having served on fellowship award committees and graduate school
admission committees, I have a pretty good idea of what a recommendation letter
needs to say, in order to flag the person as an exceptional candidate. I <i>also</i>
know what to say if I think a person is just OK, or if I don’t know them very
well! Let me say that I am very happy to
write fantastic recommendation letters on behalf of my graduate students,
graduate students for whom I have served on their PhD committees, undergraduate
interns, undergraduate mentees, exceptional students in my class, former
co-workers, and faculty colleagues. It
bugs the heck out of me to be asked to write a letter for a student who I have
barely met, but who just needs “someone” to write a letter for them because
they never took the opportunity to make themselves known to a faculty member
before. I am a softy, so I always say
“yes” anyway. I have a folder on my
computer that contains every recommendation letter that I have ever written,
and it is a <i>long</i> list! A great letter needs to be detailed, obviously
not a cookie-cutter cut/paste job, and approximately 2-pages long. These days, I can churn out a good letter in
~1 hour if I am already familiar with the person, and longer if I have to study
their CV (for faculty promotion cases).
For graduate school applicants, a typical student seems to submit their
application to ~10 schools, so every Thanksgiving break I find myself uploading
~10 letters to ~10 schools/letter for ~100 web sites. Yawn.
At least I can do that part while watching a football game. Next year, I’m going to see if my secretary
can do the uploading part for me. I have
been asked to write recommendation letters for people for whom I actually had a
negative opinion on two occasions. I was
honest and tactful. The person was hired
anyway on both occasions, but whoever hired them cannot say that they were not
warned!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Advising my Graduate
Students:</i> Since I do not have time
to work in the lab myself, my graduate students are my hands, eyes, ears, and
brain in the laboratory. My biggest opportunity
to guide their tasks, to get them to think about new ideas, and to take an
efficient path to completing a project is during the time that I meet with them
in person. I have found that seeing a
student nearly every week is the best way to keep them on track, and to avoid
the phenomenon of going off into the “wilderness” of fruitless wheel-spinning
activities. However, if I am advising ~12 students and if I meet with them for
1 hour/week, it will take nearly a 1.5 day/week chunk out of my schedule. Many of my research projects involve more
than one student, and I have found that students that should be cooperating
sometimes do not communicate with each other unless I enforce it in some way. So I have been using a system of meeting with
students individually every other week for 30 minutes, while using the
alternate weeks for 60-minute sub-group meetings of 3-4 students who are
working on similar projects. I have
found that 30 minutes is enough to get an idea of what a student has
accomplished in the past week, and to give them an idea of how to address
problems that they are encountering. The
individual meeting does not allow shy students to “hide” from me in situations
where another student may be more vocally dominant, and allows me time to discuss
their particular situation and milestones without them having to worry about
what other students might be thinking.
The sub-group meetings allow each student to share their most recent
results with the rest of the group, and allows us to take a higher level
strategic view of the project goals. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Meetings with my students are quite honestly my favorite
part of the week, and I do not allow other priorities to infringe upon that
time. At the start of each term, I ask
each student to write a list of their goals, and we review the goals together –
sometimes with me adding or subtracting items from their list. At the end of the term, we review the goals
together to see how things went, and update as needed. <i>My</i>
goal is to keep the students focused on activities that will help them move
speedily towards completing their journal publications and thesis without too
many unproductive excursions. Actually,
a few excursions are OK, but I like to know about them!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Founding a Startup
Company:</i> Last year, I founded a new
company, with the goal of commercializing some technology that has been under
development in my group for the past several years, and is ready to make the
leap. I had founded a company
previously, so I have some idea of what to expect, but that first company was
my full-time job responsibility, so I was not juggling anything else at the
same time. First, I found that none of
my senior students really had the burning interest to be an entrepreneur, so I
felt that it was up to me to create the vision, understand the potential
markets, develop a product development plan, and to build a team of experienced
advisors who could help me consider all aspects of intellectual property,
business development, investment, and government grant possibilities. There were also a lot of boring “nuts and
bolts” administrative stuff to take care of, that could not be done by anyone
except me. Over the past several months,
I have spent a considerable amount of time meeting with mentors and advisors to
discuss business strategy, markets, competing technology, intellectual property
licensing, personnel, investment, milestones, and money. I have spoken with potential business
partners, joint-development partner companies, potential investors, and
potential suppliers of key services.
Especially with potential investors and business relationships, it takes
many hours of meetings to get familiar with each other, and to explore whether
or not there is a good match. At this
point, it is up to me to develop the manufacturing plan, to write the product
requirements specifications, to raise the money, and to decide on the first few
key hires. Many of the discussions with
potential investors and potential commercialization partners end up going
nowhere in the end, making the time seem like it was wasted, but really it is
all part of the game. In theory, the
University allows me to spend one day per week on activities like this. Honestly, I can’t keep track since so much of
it ends up taking place in the evenings, the weekends, or in small bursts
during the workday. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Administrative
Responsibilities:</i> One of my
responsibilities is to serve as the Director of the Bioengineering Graduate
Program, which means that I am responsible for what happens to graduate
students in Bioengineering who are working across campus for ~13 core BioE
faculty and ~45 affiliate faculty across campus. I’m responsible for overseeing graduate
admissions, managing our qualifying exam process, assisting graduate students
who have a wide range of issues, and developing new programs. I am also the person who graduate students
turn to if they are not getting along with their advisor, cannot find an
advisor, or who just want some advice on how to get by in graduate school. It’s hard to say how much time this activity
takes, since it is not consistent through the year. I am working to establish a
new professional degree program in Bioinstrumentation, which needs a lot of
coordination with industry people, marketing people, faculty in engineering,
and faculty in business.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Writing Journal
Manuscripts:</i> While I wrote nearly
all the text and produced all the figures for the journal papers in the earlier
parts of my career, I ask my students to do quite a lot of it now, and I serve
in more of an editorial role. I will
generally guide students towards what data they need to produce that will
result in a convincing paper, and outline the sequence of figures and what data
should be included in each figure. This
process usually takes a few rounds of refinement, but the figures are the heart
of the paper, and we work those out before doing much substantial writing. The student who will be listed as first
author is responsible for preparing the first draft, and I ask them to write the
abstract, introduction, results, discussion, and conclusion sections to the
best of their ability before giving it to me.
Depending on the writing skill of the student, I may rewrite the entire
introduction and abstract, or I may just make a few organizational and
grammatical suggestions. Usually, I edit
the whole paper pretty heavily, except in a few cases. Most papers seem to take between 5-10 drafts
before they are ready to submit. So many
students have not yet developed good writing habits, skill with creating clear
figures and plots, or even overall logical organization of a convincing
argument. Although often the first paper
by a new graduate student is a tough multi-multi-draft exercise, the final
papers by finishing graduate students can be very close to finished after a
couple of rounds of edits. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Writing Grant
Applications – </i>To keep the money coming in to support all the ideas we come
up with, it’s necessary to write grant applications to companies, NIH, NSF, and
other foundations. It’s hard for me to
estimate how much of my time is spent on grant writing, but I need to have
several hours of uninterrupted time to make much progress on them. Holding all the various pieces in my head,
thinking about how the reviewers will understand what I write, making a logical
and convincing argument about why our idea is significant and innovative while
developing an approach that makes it all look feasible takes a lot of
concentration. Every time the phone
rings, the email pings, or someone just decides to pop into my office probably
sets me back by 10-15 minutes, as I try to regain my train of thought. So I have found that my office is probably
the absolute worst place to get any proposal writing done. My practice is to
take my laptop to any location where people cannot find me, and try to get my
writing done. It takes quite a while to
work up figures like Gantt charts, and concise descriptions of the technical
approach. Sometimes I ask a student to
help me with specific drawings, but generally never with the writing. Most proposals require collaborating with
other scientists, so getting their inputs and making the whole proposal merge
together takes a lot of time. Some
proposals require meetings to discuss/debate the plan, or even to meet new
people who I have not worked with before.
Mostly, I try to get proposal work done over the summer, but I always
have something in the works. The process
of having to write a proposal is actually an excellent way to organize my ideas
and to develop a workable plan of attack.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Meetings, Meeting,
Meetings:</i> I’ve discovered now that
more people want to talk to me than I actually have time to meet with. However,
face-to-face interaction is important, especially for mentoring students and
making personal connections to other scientists. Every semester, I mentor ~30 undergraduate
students, serve on ~15 preliminary or final exam committees for PhD students,
and participate in ~10 PhD qualifying exams.
I meet with my graduate students every week, and we have a weekly group
meeting. All the committees in the
department meet every week, and I meet with the Managing Director of my NSF
center, and the coordinator of BioE graduate studies for an hour every
week. Sometimes, all the hours between
8AM-6PM are completely filled with meetings, so I end up answering my email for
3 hours after dinner in the evening. If I can find a way to save time by NOT
meeting someone, I will certainly try, but it is not always possible.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Administrative –
getting bit by a million mosquitos = being sucked dry by one big vampire!</i> While no single administrative task is so
burdensome by itself that it is worth complaining about, sometimes it seems
like there are so many of them that combined, they add up to <i>real</i> amounts of time that I would
frankly rather be doing something else.
I understand the necessity for it, but it seems like there is always
more of it to do every year! An
incomplete list includes performing yearly performance reviews for all graduate
students, performing yearly performance reviews for university staff who I supervise,
progress reports (technical and financial) for every grant, university ethics
training, university safety training, university child-molestation-reporting
training, accreditation reporting, ranking of students in my classes, graduate
student RA appointments, travel expense reimbursement forms, purchase orders… We have forms and documentation for
everything we do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Travel:</i> I hit Platinum status on American Airlines
last year, and I am not totally proud of it.
The benefits are nice though. I
seem to travel somewhere at least twice per month, whether it is for a review
panel, a conference, a meeting with a collaborator, or even just for
vacation. Actually, when I am on travel,
I cannot attend all the meetings that I talked about earlier, so I find that I
actually have more time. I can get a lot
of writing and reading done in the airport, on the plane, and in the hotel that
otherwise would actually take much longer.
I refuse to do much more than monitor my email (and not answer unless
it’s an emergency) while on vacation.
I’m old enough to remember the days before laptops and smartphones, when
you could really be gone from work. It
was pretty good, so sometimes I still like to pretend that there is no
internet.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Answering Email:</i> Email is the bane of my existence. I receive 100-150 emails per day, and
sometimes I cannot answer them faster than the rate at which they arrive. While I sit in meetings in my office, I can
hear my computer softly announcing the arrival of a new one very few minutes,
and I am terrified to see that I got another 40 to deal with while I was
interacting with people in the real world.
The analogy that I use is a soccer goalie who has to stop a dozen balls
coming at him at once from all different directions. No matter how hard he tries, one is going to
get by once in a while if he lets his guard down for an instant! I can delete about half of the email immediately
after looking at it, but a lot of stuff requires me to think and read before
immediately reacting. A lot of it ends
up putting a new item on my to-do list (a report that is coming due, a meeting
to attend, a paper to edit, an administrative requirement, some new form of
“training” that is required by the University… the list never ends). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Since I am 48 years old, I remember having my first email
account as a graduate student at Illinois, and there were only ~15 other people
I knew who had an email address. I
remember being kind of happy when someone sent me something, before there could
be an attachment with 90 pages of things to read. Now I hate email from the core of my
soul! I must spend at least 2-3 hours
per day dealing with it, but honestly I can’t keep track. I must admit that I am part of the problem by
sending people so much email myself.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">So that solves some of the mystery of what a professor
does with all their time. Actually,
sometimes I get to go into the lab, but nobody lets me push buttons or turn
knobs on equipment anymore. However, I
miss the days when I spent my time building and measuring things with my own
hands. The payoff is when a student
accomplishes something great, or when we show off some cool new science for the
first time. We make ambitious plans to
make a difference in the world, and it is great to see when our ideas are
having an impact. It’s also fantastic to
see my students go out into the world and accomplish things on their own. I always have time to hear from my students,
and how their lives and careers are going.
Be sure to stop by, give me a call, or shoot me an email! Those </span><!--EndFragment-->Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-42070054290478620472011-02-28T13:40:00.002-06:002011-02-28T13:40:25.859-06:00What am I looking for when hiring a new graduate student<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">February 28, 2011</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For students who are entering graduate school with the intention of earning a PhD, the choice of an advisor is truly a career-determining decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your thesis topic is certainly not the only thing that you will ever work on in your career, but your choice of a research group will determine at least what your scientific focus will be for the next 5 years of your life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students seek out faculty to serve as their advisors by any number of criteria: Are they famous?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are they well-funded?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are they working in the technical area that is likely to result in future faculty positions?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is their research group spinning out companies with a lot of potential?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are they the same nationality?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are they at a prestigious university?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do students seem to be graduating in a reasonable amount of time?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While you might be considering all these questions about potential advisors, let’s think about how things look from the opposite point of view: What are professors looking for when considering which new students to bring into their research group.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For a faculty member, this is an extremely serious question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Excellent students will be able to work independently, collaborate on development of creative ideas, work hard, write lots of papers, and give presentations that reflect upon the whole research group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Poor students will not make much progress in the lab, will need precise directions for every small task, will never think for themselves, never conclude an experiment, write poorly organized papers with no attention to grammar or spelling, and mumble incoherently when up in front of an audience at a conference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hardly any students start off graduate school in the “excellent” category in all respects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While part of the process of learning in graduate school is to develop, over time, the skills and approaches that are more like the “excellent” student than the “poor” one, a professor is looking at a potential new graduate student and trying to decide if they have the makings of future greatness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ability to recognize great students has consequences for the professor: a group loaded with poor students is going to accomplish very little, resulting in lower numbers of high quality publications, little research getting done in the lab, and bad prospects for tenure and promotion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly, a professor can try to micromanage students, write every word of every paper, and take total responsibility for every tiny aspect of the group – but with a big cost in time, effort, and potential accomplishments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is far better, and less frustrating, to hire great students, to help them to develop their full potential, and to work with them as colleagues.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The relationship between a professor and their graduate student is kind of like the Jedi/Apprentice relationship in Star Wars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The two people will be spending a lot of time together for several years, and most faculty members can only effectively train a handful of students at any one time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A professor may also be responsible for providing funding support for a student for several years – representing a big commitment in successful proposal-writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further, the student will be the person working in the lab to achieve the proposal’s goals, and thus will determine to some extent whether the “customer” (funding source) will be happy or not – which in turn has an impact on the professor’s ability to obtain future funding.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So selection of a student by a faculty member means a lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do not know how typical my research group is, but in an average year, I may hire between 1-3 new students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am comfortable serving as the advisor for no more than ~12 students at any one time, so at this point my group has reached a kind of steady state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly, I look to replace students who are graduating (and try to arrange some overlap between the new ones and the graduating ones), or to staff a new research grant that has been recently awarded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly there are research “mega-groups” with a famous faculty member who oversees 30 postdocs and 50+ graduate students, but in groups like that it is most likely the postdocs rather than the professor who you will see most often.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In such groups, I have heard that the professor “does not even know your name” until you have prepared a first-author journal manuscript for a major journal.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">With no more than 3 positions available per year, I receive literally hundreds of requests per year from students who are interested in joining my group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How do I choose?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I mentioned, hiring a new student is a risk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like most people, I would like to minimize my risk to some extent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Therefore, the students most likely to be hired as students are those who I already know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fortunately, the University of Illinois is one of the top engineering schools in the US and in the world, and the population of undergraduate students is extremely good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I teach undergraduate courses every year, and get to observe directly the classroom performance of nearly all seniors and juniors who are interested in MEMS and biosensors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can tell which students are taking the time to prepare for exams, doing a meticulous job on their homework assignments, asking good questions, and thinking about interesting topics for their final projects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When those students apply to the University of Illinois for graduate school and indicate that they are interested in my area of research, those are among the students that I will consider first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also host several undergraduate students in my research group who are working on research projects for course credit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I meet with them individually several times during their internship and can see what progress they are making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The undergraduate students work with graduate students in my group who serve as their mentors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I ask my graduate students about who is a hard worker, a fast learner, a careful experimentalist, and a good collaborative personality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a great undergraduate student who is working in either my lab or another faculty member’s lab shows interest in graduate school and joining my group, I am sure to talk with them, and they are at the very top of my list.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So it seems like undergraduate students at the University of Illinois have the best shot at joining my group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is true, but they are not the only students who I consider as top candidates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When students from other universities apply to graduate school at Illinois, they can indicate on their application which research groups they are interested in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When it is time to consider graduate school applications, I look at all the applicants who indicated interest in my area, but only if their GPA is greater than 3.5/4.0.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grades are not everything in life, but they do say something about a student (see a future blog entry: “What do your grades say about you?”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A student with very strong grades at an engineering program that I know to be a rigorous one also goes to the top of my list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I look most closely at the applications of students with GPA>3.8/4.0 because these grades represent a long-term dedication to excellent performance and some ability to master a wide variety of course material.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students from top-10 engineering schools with excellent grades also stand a strong chance of getting support from a Fellowship, which I can facilitate in some cases by writing recommendation letters or by working together to define a research plan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grades are not everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also carefully read students’ essays to see if they can communicate effectively, to understand their motivation for going to graduate school, and to see if they articulate a research interest that matches mine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, I also carefully read a student’s recommendation letters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am looking for evidence of intellectual curiosity, problem solving ability, good interpersonal skills, and willingness to take on challenging problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I happen to know the faculty member who wrote a recommendation letter, it carries extra weight with me, and I might follow up by writing a note asking about the student.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If all this is good, THEN I will write an email to the student to arrange a phone interview.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Basically, I will not hire someone without having an opportunity to meet them - at least by phone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How a student handles the interview can either make me excited about hiring them, or totally kill my enthusiasm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some students do not seem to understand that interviewing a faculty member for a Research Assistant position is exactly like interviewing for a job, and fail to take it seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before speaking with a professor, you should know something about their research (at least from their web page) and you should have at least browsed through a couple of recent papers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being able to ask a couple of good questions shows that you have at least thought about what the research group does.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A student who can articulate a specific desire to work in some area is much more impressive than one who just says that they want to work on “something” or “anything having to do with nanotechnology.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to hire someone who is committed to making an impact on the world with their research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A student who wants to “cure cancer” is much better than one who wants to “think about it for a while and then see what clicks.” I have heard both things.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I have hired several students who worked for another advisor (at Illinois or elsewhere) and left their former group for some reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, if a faculty member moves to another school, or if a faculty member is notorious for poor relationships with their students (no names mentioned here), their semi-trained students often work out extremely well in a new environment with a new research topic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These also are students who I can know a lot about from having them in my class, or by asking other professors what their opinions are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will also meet with them, sometimes several times, to see if there is a good fit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a student has been let go by their previous advisor for poor performance, however, then I am very unlikely to consider them unless the circumstances were exceptional.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Students from foreign countries have a more difficult path to joining my research group, however, I have served as the advisor for many very excellent foreign students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the top students from foreign countries are awarded fellowships that enable them to train in the US.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If these students have top grades from a great school AND financial support for at least part of their graduate education, it significantly lowers the risk to hiring them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If they get here and turn out not to be well-suited to a PhD program, occasionally they may leave Illinois with a M.S. degree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the student gets here and turns out to be great, I am happy to support them for their Ph.D. work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So in essence, their financial support helped move them closer to the top of the list – even though I still carefully read their application materials and talk with them before recommending admission.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For students who are not in any of these categories, this “system” may seem unfair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The system is not totally different from the way that college basketball teams all try to get the best players from the top schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>College basketball recruiters look at the numbers (like points per game, wins/losses), the quality of the basketball program at the previous school, the strength of the training provided by other coaches who they know, the opinions of other people, and their own instincts about who will develop greatness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The top college basketball teams are able to pick from the top players, and there is a definite stratification that is used to differentiate the top from the rest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The top research universities are able to likewise draw from the best undergraduate programs worldwide, and the competition is very tough.</div><!--EndFragment-->Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-18731911774333142702010-12-09T19:57:00.000-06:002010-12-09T19:57:34.177-06:00The ECE Hallows<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Speech at HKN Dinner – December 5, 2010</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The ECE Hallows, by Brian T. Cunningham</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It is 1950.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new ECE building is only one year old, and William Everitt is now the Dean of the College of Engineering after having served as the Department Head since 1944.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Three ECE seniors have been staying up late every night for the past two weeks to complete their final project before the end of the semester.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing seems to have gone right, and as a result they are tired, frustrated, and by ~2AM they are considering giving up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Unexpectedly, Prof. Everitt walks into the laboratory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He says, “I have noticed how hard you have been working, since I have been seeing the lights on in this lab every night for the past two weeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just wanted to stop by and see what you are up to.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One of the students said, “Well Prof. Everitt, to tell you the truth, we have only been here so much because we can’t seem to get our project to work at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, we were just discussing whether we would give up on the whole thing, and we were wondering whether we are really cut out for being engineers at all!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Prof. Everitt replied, “I can see how dedicated you are, and I want to help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is within my power to grant each of you one wish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, consider what you wish for carefully.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The first student thought for ~5 seconds and said “Prof. Everitt, this project has made me worried that maybe I am not a truly great engineer, so my wish is to never be fired from my job.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Prof. Everitt reached into his briefcase, and took out a pair of bright orange Illini boxer shorts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Presenting them to the first student, he said “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">these are the</b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Boxer Shorts of Invincibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As long as you wear them, you can never be fired or laid off from your job.</b>”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The second student said “Prof. Everitt, you would not believe how much time I spend studying for exams and working on my homework assignments, but I still get B’s in some of my classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I wish that I could be like one of those genius students who can get everything right without studying</b>.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Prof. Everitt reached into his briefcase again, and took out an orange Illini pencil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Presenting it to the student, he said “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">this is the Pencil of Infallibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As long as you use it, every answer that you write with it will be 100% correct.</b>”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Immediately recognizing the enormous value of such an artifact, the student gratefully accepted it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The third student said “Prof. Everitt, I think that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">my biggest problem is that I do not have the energy to do all the things that I want to do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes I try hard and fail, and that makes it hard to keep going the next time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just wish that I never get tired or discouraged</b>.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Looking into his briefcase once more, Prof. Everitt took out an Illini rubber duck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Giving it to the third student, he said “<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">this is the Duck of Willpower.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you take a nice hot bubble bath with it, you will find that you will have a positive outlook on all your problems the next day, and the energy to work on them”</b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The third student took the duck, and thanked Prof. Everitt, thinking that she got the lousiest gift of the three, especially because she did not like taking baths.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Prof. Everitt turned to go home, saying, “good luck with your project!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The students could not believe what just happened, and <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">really just thought that Prof. Everitt was playing a joke on them</b>, since he was known for having a great sense of humor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">However, just out of curiosity, the second student sharpened his new Pencil of Infallibility, and tried again to analyze the problem that they were trying so hard to solve just a few minutes ago. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Miraculously, he suddenly knew exactly what formula to write down, and even somehow clearly understood what his equation meant</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Excited now, he continued solving equations, recalling concepts that he somehow knew despite never having studied them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was as if, as long as he wrote <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">with the Pencil, he was an incredible genius without even trying</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Within an hour, he completely understood what they had been doing wrong, and could see how to make the project work perfectly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was amazing.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The two other students were equally amazed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They could see that the Pencil had incredible powers, and they now took their own gifts seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The three students made a promise to never discuss this night ever again with anyone, as long as they lived!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They finished their project, and went their separate ways.<o:p></o:p></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Student #1 (the one with the Boxer Shorts of Invincibility) graduated that year, and got a job as a design engineer with a big government defense contractor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Even though he did not think he really needed the Boxer Shorts on his first day of work, he wore them anyway</b>, and got into the habit of wearing them every Monday through Friday.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Things at the company were actually pretty good for 4 years or so</b>, since the company was growing and hiring like crazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Profits were at record levels and everyone was getting stock options and bonuses every year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thought that he probably wasted his wish, and stopped wearing the boxer shorts since his wife (a Purdue graduate) thought they were unattractive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">However, after the fifth year, the economy was bad, defense spending was down, and the company president retired</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new management team was known mostly for their skill in “downsizing” at their previous company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Before long, there was a round of layoffs, and ~15% of the employees at the student’s department were let go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He made sure to wear the boxer shorts to work each day without fail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The company reorganized, and 50% of his department was let go, while the rest were combined with another department.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The department was sold off to be managed by a hedge fund based in Sweden, and suddenly he did not even know who his boss was anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He started wearing the boxer shorts on weekends just to be safe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Nothing was ever good anymore at his company after that</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, no matter what happened, he always seemed to end up with a job somewhere in the company. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">s a result, he started to believe that he really was invincible</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He started coming into the office later and later in the morning, and leaving earlier in the afternoon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If there was a project deadline, he did not worry about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">He had seen so many of his projects scrapped, dropped, or changed over the years that he did not see the point anymore</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He started taking longer lunch hours, and sat around complaining about the crappy management of the company and endlessly trying to figure out what the next calamity was going to be, based on cryptic comments made by the management in the newspapers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One year, a few people at the company left to form a new startup, but he was never considered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Dissatisfied with the company, he tried to interview for a job at other companies, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">but the Boxer Shorts offered no aid in getting a new job, only enabling him to keep his current one</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Former managers and coworkers did not write very strong recommendation letters for him, so new employers stayed away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On the positive side, the boxer shorts allowed him to devote plenty of time to his outside interests, so he had plenty of hobbies, traveled a lot, volunteered in his community, and spent a lot of time with his family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So it wasn’t all bad, as long as the company itself never went out of business…</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The student with the Pencil of Infallibility finished his senior year with amazing success</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every homework assignment was absolutely perfect, and he got perfect scores on every exam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Finishing his senior year with all A+ grades allowed him to get several job offers with high salaries</b>, and he took a job that would allow him to do a lot of hard core engineering problem solving and analysis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">His bosses were amazed, and soon started throwing every hard problem at him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The student was starting to get a little worried though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to use the pencil as sparingly as possible because it got shorter every time he sharpened it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He realized that once it ran out, his magic streak of easy infinite knowledge would end!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The Pencil had other shortcomings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though he would always be right when he used the pencil, he could not explain what he wrote to someone else, unless it was about something that he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actually</i> understood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Further, he found that all the “big” problems at the company were actually worked on by teams of people, and that no one person could possibly do everything themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since people soon realized that he was not a “team player” he got assignments that allowed him to analyze small aspects of problems, and he was never put in charge of a group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He also found that many problems could not be solved by mathematical analysis alone, and that success of the company’s products depended on things like whether or not the customers actually liked them, the needs of the market, and other human factors.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He started to fear the day that his pencil would run out, and people would discover that he did not really know anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In fact, because the pencil was so good, he did not put a lot of effort into keep current in the quickly changing engineering world, and his actual knowledge was getting out of date.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">With only ¼ of the pencil remaining, he decided that he needed to take drastic action soon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wisely, he put the pencil away and starting studying and solving problems on his own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He read scientific journals in several fields and took classes whenever he could in both engineering topics and management.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">He worked on developing his people skills, and gradually gained more and more responsibility, getting raises and promotions every few years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He only took the pencil out once a year to do his taxes.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The student with the Duck of Willpower also put her gift to good use during the rest of senior year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed to give her the extra drive that she needed to study a little longer and to figure out homework problems without asking the TA for help every time she got frustrated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The Duck also seemed to get her to take on challenges and opportunities that she previously felt too flustered to take on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She did an undergraduate research project with one of her professors, who recommended that she attend graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She took on leadership roles in the student chapter of IEEE.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In fact, her Willpower seemed to be infectious, since it seemed like other students would get interested in activities like mentoring and technical seminars only after she started organizing them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">She soon got used to the baths, and used the time to relax and to plan what she would devote her energy to next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Once in graduate school, the Duck of Willpower was also very useful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She took the initiative to read the scientific literature in her research field, and tried to understand what the key problems were that needed to be solved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Instead of waiting for her advisor to tell her exactly what to do every week, she would go into the lab and do what she thought was needed, and report back with her results.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of her experiments failed, some several times, but eventually she could always identify the problems and get things to work correctly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The Willpower seemed to extend to life outside of work, so she could pursue any outside interest with equal energy, so she took up playing the guitar and ballroom dancing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In her first job after graduate school, it was not long before she was supervising a group of employees leading to the development of their leading product.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When she and a few co-workers saw an opportunity to spin out a new company, she jumped at the chance, and was soon convincing venture capital investors to put millions of dollars into her idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Needless to say, she was enormously successful both personally and professionally.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This story is a fable, but the point is to ask you to think about what you want out of yourself, your life, and your career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What is the best attribute to have, and to develop within yourself?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Is it to be “safe?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Is it to be a “genius?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One point of my story is that, especially now, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">safety is an illusion</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Companies come and go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Departments reorganize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Economies go up and down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Safety is actually attained by being the best you can be, and by making yourself valuable through your knowledge, attitude, skills, and effort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A second point of my story is that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">genius is a gift that VERY few people have</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As a student, it seemed to me like there were always a few people to whom everything came easily, and that little effort was needed to get the highest grades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found that, even though I was far from being the smartest student, if I tried hard enough, I could get myself to understand almost anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Most people who we think of as brilliant actually are very dedicated to developing their skill</b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">over time</b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more you work at being good at something, the better you get at it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This applies to writing, engineering, playing a musical instrument, sports, and many other areas of life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Certainly a little ability and the opportunity to learn from excellent teachers helps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You all have that ability, and I would argue that your education at Illinois is among the best engineering education institutions that exists in the world today.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Through circumstances that I am not at liberty to divulge, I have come to possess all three of the magical items that Prof. Everitt gave to those students in 1950, including a renewed Pencil of Infallibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Since I was granted tenure three years ago, I no longer need the Boxer Shorts of Invincibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Since I am a professor, of course now I am never wrong, so I do not use the Pencil of Infallibility either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you would like to borrow either of these for a while, let me know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I will, however, hold on to the Rubber Duck of Willpower, since even for professors, that is useful from time to time especially at the end of the semester!</div><!--EndFragment-->Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-31931987681709021692010-05-24T09:24:00.002-05:002010-05-24T09:24:47.200-05:00Industry and Academia – What are the Differences?<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">When I graduated with my PhD in 1990 and searched for my first job, becoming a professor was one of the furthest things from my mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s hard for me to remember now why I did not consider life as a professor as an option – but I had an idea that I wanted to get out into the “real” world and to have a role in making products that people would actually use, rather than just publishing papers in scientific journals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, even though I had published papers in some of the top journals, worked for a very famous advisor, and came from one of the best university-based research groups in the world in my field (compound semiconductors) I somehow did not feel qualified to be a professor on my own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It just seemed that there was a huge gap between what my advisor and other professors were able to do, and my perceptions of my own capabilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could I teach?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could I raise money?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could I do a decent job advising someone else, when I hardly knew what to do myself?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Also, at the time that I was ready to hold a job, there were several great alternatives to academia within industry for someone who was interested in doing basic research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Big industrial research laboratories such as Bell Labs, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center all operated world-class research centers that promised great facilities, top-notch collaborators, higher-than-academic salaries, and a streamlined path to commercializing ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many large semiconductor, automotive and defense companies had research laboratories that followed the Bell Labs model, including Raytheon, General Motors, Ford, TRW, Texas Instruments, Hewlett Packard, and Hughes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than pursuing an academic career, many of the brightest students were heavily recruited by these organizations, which offered a highly attractive combination of stability (without having to obtain outside funding support), the ability to publish and patent extensively, and no requirement to teach classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>National laboratories such as Sandia National Laboratory, Lincoln Laboratory, Draper Laboratory, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore offered very similar research experiences, but often with requirements to work on projects with a “secret” classification that would make it harder to publish.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Through the course of several economic recessions that occurred since the late 1980’s, most of the corporate research laboratories that I mentioned have been either completely eliminated or folded into the manufacturing parts of the company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In some cases, “research” could be more accurately described as incremental product development, with the goal of more quickly delivering product enhancements to existing product lines, rather than developing fundamentally new products that the company might bring to market 5-10 years down the road.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While business executives can rightfully point to increased efficiencies that are realized through operating in this way (due to elimination of projects that might consume millions of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>research dollars per year, and yet generate no revenue), there are now fewer opportunities for young engineers to develop the skills and resume that would help them make a transition to academia later in their careers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a result, in my opinion, the most innovative research now takes place at universities, startup companies, and national laboratories – but that will be the topic of a later blog entry.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Since I have worked at a big industry research laboratory (Raytheon Company’s Research Division – now closed), two government laboratories (Sandia National Laboratory and Draper Laboratory – both still open), a startup company (SRU Biosystems – also still open), and most currently at a university (University of Illinois – still going strong since opening its doors in 1868), students sometimes ask me about the advantages and disadvantages of each.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The following list is only my opinion, based upon only my own experiences and those gathered from friends and colleagues over the last 20 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are exceptions to every rule, and your own experiences may differ.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will start with corporate research labs of big companies.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Corporate Lab Advantages</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Strong focus on translating R&D projects into something that makes an impact on the marketplace in the short term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you want to see your work “out there” right away, then this is the place for you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The best labs are tied in pretty closely with marketing and manufacturing, and are highly focused on developing new features that are sought by customers of that can address a niche that might give some advantage over a competitor that is offering something similar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Can be an exciting environment since product development cycles are now very fast in some industries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trade shows at conferences can be filled with intrigue (what are the competitors going to unveil this time?) high stakes business deals, and the experience of being part of a big team (i.e. everyone wearing the same shirt to trade shows).</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>If you like to be told what to do or assigned tasks by your manager, then this is the place to go for a new graduate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially at the beginning, a new PhD or MS engineer will not have much autonomy, with tasks or projects being assigned according to needs.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>The pay can be good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In some companies more than others, there are opportunities to earn performance bonuses, based upon the market success of your project or meeting some performance objectives.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>There is a perception of job stability, but this can be an illusion (see “Disadvantages” below).</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Despite a (sometimes) short-term focus, there can still be opportunities for performing more fundamental research and proposing new ideas if the topic is directly related to a company’s core strengths.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>If you don’t like writing research grant proposals or raising money from investors, then this is the place for you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might still need to convince internal managers to fund projects that you support, so you are not totally off the hook.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>A lot of people work 8AM-5PM, but there can be periods of longer hours near deadlines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People who want to be seen as ambitious will consistently work longer hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Overall, it is not impossible to have outside interests and a family life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Corporate Laboratory Disadvantages</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>At a really big place, it can feel like your own personal contribution to the success of the company is extremely small or nonexistent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I worked at Raytheon, the company’s annual sales were in the billions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When a new idea would be proposed for some new semiconductor component, managers would ask: “what is the size of the market that we could generate with this product?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the answer was “0.01 billion dollars per year” the whole effort would be “in the noise” in the context of the whole company’s sales.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same idea might be considered as a more substantial opportunity somewhere else.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Even if your company is large, job stability is an illusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Companies of all sizes are constantly going through re-organizations, mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For every merger or acquisition that happens, there are probably at least 10 that “almost” happen but that don’t go forward for some reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regardless, each transition results in disruption to your potential job function, who you work for, whether your job will be sent elsewhere (another state or country), and whether you will still have a seat after the music stops in the game of corporate musical chairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each of these events can present new opportunities, but can also lead to much hand-wringing and rumors, as people try to guess what is going to happen to their job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my opinion, your only source of stability is to perform excellent work at all times and to maintain the highest ethical standards at all times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When your boss’s boss is looking to lay off some percentage<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of the division, you want to be the most valuable person – the one they would never consider letting go.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Big companies can have big bureaucracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Decisions about anything important can take layers of management approval, hours of meetings, committees, and consultants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This can especially be a problem if the company is considering doing something new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is much easier to come up with excuses to kill an idea than it is to take a risk on advocating a new idea, which results in, very often, new technologies getting killed at a big company before they get a chance to become a product.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>You will not get much vacation time – all least at first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two weeks of vacation<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>per year for the first few years at a big company are standard.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>You may not get much opportunity to publish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you think that you would like be become a faculty member someday, it is important to establish a publication trail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some positions will provide more opportunity than others to publish research results.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Often, if the R&D project is comprised of incremental advances, scientific journal submissions may not be reviewed very favorably or the company will suppress publication in order to maintain a competitive advantage.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>In my experience, some (but certainly not all) managers seemed to be promoted for odd reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The people with greatest ability were often passed over in favor of those with the most obvious ambition, in a process that is far from rigorous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This resulted in management positions being occupied by those with the best ability to please their bosses, rather than those with the best technical understanding, organization skills, or people-management skills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While some managers were outstanding, I was puzzled by how others got their position.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Government Laboratory Advantages</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Since my time at Sandia National Laboratory was a relatively short 9-month <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>postdoc, my comments here are drawn from my experience as a scientist in the MEMS group at Draper Laboratory.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Because they offer a research environment with good funding, strong laboratory facilities and good job stability, you will find that government labs have some of the brightest people working at them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many people have risen to become highly respected world leaders in their technical specialty in this environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Government laboratories tend to focus on big problems of national importance that do not have solutions that can be solved in one quarter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Because the national laboratories address tough problems, it is possible for your work to make a fundamental impact on the environment, space exploration, energy, fundamental physics, national defense capabilities, transportation, and many others.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Funding for these priorities goes through up/down cycles that are not as rapid as those within companies, but can shift due to the whims of Congress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite this, I cannot think of any national laboratories that have gone out of business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many engineers have enough flexibility to shift to different projects as the priorities change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In general, there is more job stability than at a company.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Some research at national laboratories may be classified as “secret” and therefore impossible to pubish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, this is not strictly the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At Draper Laboratory, I worked on non-classified projects in parallel with my classified projects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though I had to fill out long forms and obtain several signatures to obtain publication permission, it would generally be granted it I could convince all concerned that no government secrets would be revealed.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>National laboratories have funding and flexibility to explore new research areas and some funding to go after them in a meaningful way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many labs are getting into “hot” research fields such as nanotechnology, life science technologies, energy transduction, sensor networks, autonomous systems, and many others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Researchers generally do not write grant applications to NIH or NSF, but may write internal research proposals or proposals to other government agencies (such as DARPA) where political connections of your managers make a big difference in your chances for getting funding.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>At Draper Laboratory, I found the environment to be very conducive to proposing new research directions, especially if it could lead to getting outside funding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lab sponsored internal proposal contest to help foster new ideas and to encourage development of proposal-writing skills.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>If the lab is affiliated with a university, there can be opportunities to continue your education through taking classes, earning a degree, teaching a class, or mentoring graduate students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no expectation that scientists at a national lab will teach, but there can be opportunities for teaching if you actively seek them out.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l4 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>You can come into work at 8AM and leave at 5PM if you want to, without being thought of as lazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A few people work longer hours when needed, but generally the parking lot was getting emptied out by 6PM.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Government Laboratory Disadvantages</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l6 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Salary is generally on par with that of industry, but without the opportunity for stock options and bonuses.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l6 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Government laboratories can have similar bureaucracy to corporations in terms of management layers, meetings, and big-decision making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the level of a scientist working in the lab, I hardly experienced bureaucracy at all, however.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l6 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>If your goal is to develop a technology into a commercial product or a spin-out company, doing it from a national lab is possible, but making the transition can be a challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some laboratories have technology transfer offices, but I have not seen these be as effective at starting successful companies as independent entrepreneurs.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l6 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>There is little incentive for people to work together, resulting in a substantial degree of politics to obtain people and resources for a project.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Entrenched people can sometimes simply refuse to cooperate with others and focus instead on their own narrow interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In one case at Draper Laboratory, a senior scientist was being verbally abusive and insulting to one of the junior female engineers on my team – in front of many witnesses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since I was the project leader, I removed the offending senior person from the team, who howled in protest to every senior manager who would listen to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t know how many hours of meetings I had to endure to deal with this jerk, but at a small company I could have simply fired him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Higher level managers simply wanted to smooth over problems and to protect the ego of a prima-donna.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l6 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>People are managed on a very strict accounting system for reporting the use of your time (in 6-minute increments – I am not kidding) so that the correct budget can be charged for your time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This leads to every engineer, scientist, secretary, and technician scrounging for “charge numbers” for performing even the smallest task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has a stifling effect on trying to get traction for any new idea that does not have a large existing budget.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l6 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>People cost a lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The overhead rates at national labs are very high, resulting in a cost of >$200-250K/year to support a single engineer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even a project with a few people working on it needs a great deal of financial support.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Startup Company Advantages</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Starting your own company is an experience like no other – but I will try to write from the perspective of someone who is thinking about joining an existing small company.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Your work will have a strong impact on the success (or failure!) of the company.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>There is a greater sense of teamwork than in any other type of organization, since everyone is in the same boat, and everyone will swim or sink together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is less tolerance for people who cannot get along or who want to do their own thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They will be asked to leave before their attitude spreads far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is not to say there is no conflict – quite the contrary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People feel passionately about the company, and will argue passionately for defining the path that they believe will be successful.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>A startup offers the best potential to substantially benefit financially, IF the company proves to be successful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We all know stories of people with stock in startups who became millionaires after the company was sold or after it went public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is also the possibility that the company will fail, or that the venture capital investors will capture most of the financial benefit before employees get much money.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>At a startup, there are opportunities to gain experience with a wide variety of roles and tasks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, I’ve taken part in marketing, creating the web site, designing a company logo, business negotiations, manufacturing process development, fundraising, hiring, and business planning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the tasks are definitely non-glamorous (fixing the copy machine, setting up the internal wireless network, ordering/unpacking office furniture, finding leaks in the roof, shoveling the snow…) but they build character, I am told.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>You will find a different style of engineer at a startup company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was fortunate to work with people with impressive technical skills, a get-it-done attitude, and dedication to excellence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no time to study something for two years before trying to implement it, so there is more of a “just build it, test it, and we’ll understand it all later” mentality that helps move projects along quickly.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>A startup has the ability to adapt to new market opportunities and customer preferences very quickly, resulting in a big advantage against larger rivals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The skills of the management team, scientists, and engineers have a direct impact on the ability of the company to become and stay profitable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Darwinian effect of this kind of pressure for survival results in, I believe, a prevalence of more effective managers and leaders at startup companies than at large companies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bad ones simply do not get to stay at the job very long before someone forces them out.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l5 level1 lfo5; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>If you work for a startup company that grows, it is possible to move up the management ranks much more quickly than you could at a big company, resulting in greater authority and salary at an earlier age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Disadvantages of a Startup Company</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Of all the working environments, a startup is perhaps the least stable, because they can fail for so many reasons – not all of which are directly under your control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world is not exactly kind to startups, with big companies trying to keep them out of established markets, the challenges of obtaining funding, and many others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some people prefer the action/adventure, while others find it very stressful to wonder whether their organization will still exist in one month or one year.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>By necessity, a startup must be highly focused on the product, requiring all elements of the team to pull together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a result, a startup may not be the right place to start your own separate new idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, successful startup companies will continue to introduce new products, so opportunities for developing a new idea are certainly possible.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Work hours at a startup can be very demanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are many milestones (imposed by investors, business partners, customers, trade shows) that simply must be met if the company is going to survive (or at least it always seems that way).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Expect to work nights and weekends – sometimes for a long period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, there are often compensations (like bonuses, time off, company recognition awards) for these efforts.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Even if the startup company consumes your life, hardly anybody else has heard of you!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is an implicit assumption that you are just out to make a buck that results in some scientists looking down on you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You will find yourself always explaining what your company does – even several years after it was founded – to people who have not heard of your products.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo6; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Universities de-value time spent at a startup compared to national laboratories, perhaps because of the low-prestige effect mentioned in the last point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, even though I had dozens of patents, many publications, and started a successful company, the University of Illinois would only hire me as an associate professor without tenure, compared to younger faculty with Bell Labs experience or faculty experience who were made full professors nearly 5 years before I was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Advantages of Being a Professor</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>One of the best things about being a faculty member is the freedom to work on whatever ideas you are excited about, and to NOT spend your time on ideas that you believe are a waste of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can work on any idea that you can get financial support for, which provides the opportunity to explore new ideas, to be creative, and to try things out that nobody has done before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is part of the excitement of being a scientist, and one of the things that I enjoy the most.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Many people outside academia consider the obligation to teach to be a disadvantage, but I consider it to be a very strong advantage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By teaching, not only are you contributing to the development of a new generation of students, but you also have to keep your own engineering skills very sharp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I taught undergraduate electromagnetics for the first time, I had to re-study Maxwell’s equations all over again – something I had not done in many years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By understanding the fundamental concepts well enough to be able to teach them (and to teach them over and over again) actually results in a deeper understanding which in turn results in better research.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Having the opportunity to help young people get their careers off to a great start is highly motivating and personally rewarding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recall the teachers in my life who had the most positive impact on my outlook and education – it is great to have the opportunity to “pay it forward” to the next generation of students.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>My colleagues are each, in their own area of expertise, among the best in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means that no matter what topic I am interested in, I directly talk with and work with people who are at the top of their field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So much research is interdisciplinary, that this is a critical advantage.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>I don’t really have a boss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is nobody who I report to every day, who checks up on my weekly or monthly progress, or who tells me exactly what I must do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(see the topic under “Disadvantages: Everybody is my boss.”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am actually SUPPOSED to spend some of my time reading, writing, and thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am actually SUPPOSED to travel around the world to scientific conferences and universities in cool places and share my research results by giving presentations and meeting people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am actually EXPECTED to organize new initiatives to help educate students more effectively, and to meet with people across the country to figure out how to do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am highly ENCOURAGED to participate in meeting with faculty colleagues from around the country to discuss and to evaluate the best research proposals in fields like nanotechnology, medical imaging, genomics technologies, and many others.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Being a faculty member results in development of strong and lasting interpersonal relationships with students, faculty, administrators, company representatives, and even parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I get to work with and interact with a much wider variety of people from different cultural and educational backgrounds that in any other job I have had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I even teach a middle-school class on Electromagnetics, basically because I wanted to.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>People have a lot of respect for professors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though I am still basically the same person who I was before I was a faculty member, I have observed that people are more respectful to me now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not only students and parents, but also scientists, lawyers, business people, investors who I meet anywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody was this nice to me when I was a startup company CTO.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that there is a general recognition that faculty members put in extra time and effort for the benefit of students, at the expense of maximizing their salaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since faculty are experts in their fields, their impartial expertise is highly sought after, where faculty may serve as consultants.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l7 level1 lfo7; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Working with students helps you keep a youthful attitude.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have met many middle-aged engineers and scientists who have become highly cynical in their careers, but that trait is very rare in faculty members.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students have such optimism and personal drive that even when asked to take on a very challenging task, they can do it extremely well, without even really knowing why the task was supposed to be difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I ask students what they would like to do in their careers, some say things like “get a job and make money,” but many others want to improve human life, develop exciting new technology, and make a positive impact on the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s really refreshing to hear that!</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Disadvantages of Being a Professor</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Being a professor is not so much of a job, as it is a way of life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can occupy much more of your time than any other job, even compared to founding a startup company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of the responsibilities are very pleasant (award ceremonies, entertaining campus visitors), others are tedious (grading 80 midterm exams), and others just come with the territory (writing graduate school recommendation letters, faculty meetings, committees).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, there are many separate groups of people who need your time, and there is only so much of it to give out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Evening exams, banquets, faculty meetings, conference calls, meetings with graduate students, grant progress reports, answering ~100 emails/day, teaching, preparing to teach, generating homework problems, interviewing faculty candidates…) all take time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I find that I work for ~2 hours every weekday evening and 8-12 hours on the weekends to keep up during the semester.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Everyone is my boss!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I find that I am constantly doing things for other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This includes multiple department heads, deans, lab directors, grant agency program managers, proposal team leaders, proposal review panel leaders, and committee chairpeople.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While it is true that you do not have a very invasive boss, you will find that you are serving many different groups and leaders at the same time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, none of these “bosses” coordinate with each other, so it is possible to have many reports, meetings, proposals, and reviews to work on, that are all due at approximately the same time.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Students think that they work pretty hard, but most of them accomplish only a fraction of the work of a good full time engineer – at least until they get near the end of their PhD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students are constantly distracted by homework assignments, midterm exams, small bumps in their personal lives, a million hobbies, and travelling around the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It still amazes me how long it takes for a new student to accomplish simple tasks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students seem to get sick with amazing frequency and duration compared to adult engineers who I have worked with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps they do not get enough sleep or maintain a good diet!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once focused on a goal, however, students are capable of working much longer hours than a non-student engineer, but this tends to happen in short bursts of activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Achieving full-time professor status and tenure at a major research university is a big-time career challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though your boss does not tell you what to do, there will be a promotion/tenure review committee that will closely study your record of accomplishments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So even though nobody is watching you, people really ARE watching you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Developing a record of excellent publications, successful proposals, service to your professional societies, excellent teaching reviews, and successful mentoring of graduate students takes a sustained commitment to developing your skills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not sure whether this is a disadvantage or not, but it is a constant source of stress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You are effectively being evaluated by all the senior faculty in your department and by many of the senior people (worldwide) in your research field who will be asked to provide external recommendation letters for your promotion.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Writing research grant applications can be a major time commitment and a mentally agonizing process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Actually, the proposal writing is not the hard part for me anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, it is reading the review comments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes, reviewers have some excellent insights and suggestions that would help to make a proposal stronger, but often the comments are totally incorrect, or indicate that the reviewer completely missed something that was written in the proposal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some funding agencies (NIH) provide an opportunity to respond to reviewer comments, while others (NSF) do not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regardless, there is a large time lag (perhaps 2 years) between the conception of an idea, preparing preliminary data to “prove” that the idea will work, proposing the idea, and getting outside funding for the idea.</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo8; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Students seem obsessed with “points.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, students take classes to earn a grade, and their GPA’s are important to them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I was a student, I wanted to earn as many points on homework assignments and exams as I could, but I don’t recall trying to beg the professors for extra points or easier grading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the greater scheme of things, the “points” seem so trivial, but it drives me nuts at the end of the semester when students beg for a higher grade than they earned because they “need” it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is at least one student who does this every semester.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><!--EndFragment-->Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-32930592339845542172010-02-17T12:07:00.000-06:002010-02-17T12:07:21.905-06:00Candid Advice on Taking the PhD Qualifying Exam<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">One of the rites of passage for earning a PhD in engineering is taking an exam that determines, at an early stage, whether a student will be allowed to continue in graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The goal is to determine whether the student has the necessary background knowledge, research capabilities, and communication skills to be successful as a PhD candidate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i> the student spends years of his/her life working on a research project, by testing whether the student displays the characteristics that typically “qualify” successful PhD candidates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually, the qualifying exams are called “quals” for short.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students who do not pass the quals generally leave the university with a Masters degree, and are often very successful as they move ahead with their careers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might say, in the cases where a student fails, the exam saves the student years of frustration and poverty, while at the same time saving their advisor from financially supporting someone who would have a difficult struggle with thesis research and publication.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Before giving advice on taking the qual in the Illinois ECE department, I should relate a little bit of history.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Every university and department has its own process for administering a PhD qualifying exam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some departments require the students to take a long written exam with topics selected from a set of core undergraduate and graduate courses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other departments require the students to give a short presentation on a research topic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet other qual exams involve a panel of 4-5 faculty asking the student to answer verbal questions by solving equations on a chalkboard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many cases, an exam may have components of all three methods!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In ~2007, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign made a transition from a 6-hour written qualifying exam to a ~1-hour oral exam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the previous written exam, the first 3-hour section was taken by every student, with questions all derived from core undergraduate classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second 3-hour section, students could select from a menu of technology areas, to receive questions close to their area of research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The area-specific questions were typically difficult ones drawn from graduate level classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The score from the exam was just one component of all the things that the department faculty would consider when determining whether a student would pass or fail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all the exams were taken and scored, the faculty would hold an evening meeting (lasting several hours) to discuss every student who took the test, going in alphabetical order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A student’s class grades, exam score, and research progress (based on verbal comments from the thesis advisor) were all considered, and each faculty member would vote to either pass or fail the student.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the exam score was not all-determining, a student in the bottom third of the scores would be at risk of failing, since the low score would lead to a discussion about whether the student truly had strong fundamental knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although no set number or percentage of students were designated to pass or fail the exam, competition was always very fierce, because no students wanted to end up in the bottom third of the scores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this reason, students would spend several weeks (in some cases the majority of a semester) doing nothing but studying for the quals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some advisors would allow their students to take the time to study by giving them little or no research responsibilities during the qual semester, but other advisors would not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regardless, the time that students would spend rehashing material from their previous classes was seen by the faculty as a drag on productivity, since students who were doing nothing but studying were still being paid their research assistantships from grant sponsors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One safety net that was (and still is) in place was that a student could have up to, but no more than, two chances at taking the qual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a student did not perform well on the first try, the faculty did not feel too bad about failing them and making them prepare better the next time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a student did not do well on the second try, there would be much more discussion to determine whether failing them would serve the best interests of the student and the department.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the downside, students who did not pass on the first try would end up studying twice, resulting in almost an entire year of research being lost.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After several years of discussion and debate, the ECE faculty came to a decision to change the qual exam format from a written exam to an oral exam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The thoughts behind this decision were that we already measure students’ fundamental knowledge through the grades that they earned in their classes, and that the written qualifying exam was redundant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, the time that students spent studying was seen as a drag on their research productivity, but that students who were given time to focus on study had an unfair advantage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, because the purpose of the qual was to determine whether the student had the necessary abilities to succeed as an independent researcher, it was felt that a research presentation (in which the student prepared a written paper, gave a short presentation, and answered questions from a panel of faculty) would more accurately measure the students’ research capability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not trying to make a statement about whether the new method is better than the old way – I am just trying to explain how the faculty arrived at this method and to give background that will help students to focus their preparation efforts.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The verbal qualifying exam is not without its problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students with poor English language capabilities (or speaking/presentation skills in general) faced a new challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because the panel of faculty examining a student would be different for each student, there could not be absolute uniformity of verbal questioning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some faculty would be much more rigorous than others, so some students would get asked a greater number of more challenging questions than others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While some students had some experience with a research project by the time they took the qual, others did not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students with more thorough research experience could draw upon material that they had developed through working with their advisor, that perhaps they had already had time to polish from a scientific journal article or a conference presentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To adjust for these differences between students, the ECE department has been instructing faculty more thoroughly about how to consider students in these different situations, and to provide some guidance (to students and faculty) about the type of knowledge students should come prepared to answer questions about. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What happens after a student gives their qual presentation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The faculty on the exam committee meets immediately afterwards to discuss the student’s performance, and answers a series of questions about their background knowledge, handling of questions, the clarity of the written report, presentation skills, and specific knowledge relevant to the research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each component is scored on a scale of “Excellent,” “Good,” and “Needs Improvement.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The faculty member who chairs the exam committee writes a consensus evaluation that summarizes the thoughts of all the faculty on the committee, which is reviewed and approved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of the written evaluations and scores are entered into a database, and all the information is available when the entire department faculty meets to discuss every student who took the exam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition, the evaluation comments and scores are shared with the student. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As in the old system, the entire faculty meets to discuss each student’s case individually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the faculty meeting, the evaluation comments are available along with the grades (and class ranking) from every class taken by the student, and the student’s thesis advisor is required to make a verbal statement about the student’s research progress.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So how should a student navigate this process to maximize their chances of passing on the first try?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The process of preparation actually should begin as soon as a student enters graduate school with the intention of earning a PhD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A student cannot earn a PhD (or even register to take the PhD qualifying exam) without a research advisor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This means that a student must find a faculty member who is willing to advise them and (ideally) to provide financial support in the form of a Research Assistantship (RA).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This process is not trivial, and is so important that it should be a new graduate student’s highest priority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many graduate students enter the program with a research advisor already lined up, but this is not the case for everyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a student has financial support from a Teaching Assistantship (TA), they will not always have an advisor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a later blog, I will write more about the process of finding an advisor, but why is it important to have an advisor for the qual?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The answer is that if a student begins working on a research project and learning the background knowledge to perform the research effectively, they are developing the skills and presentation material that will get them through the qual with flying colors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a student is working with a research advisor from the beginning of graduate school, they are effectively preparing for the qual from their first semester of graduate school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a student joins a research group in the same semester that they take the qual, they may only have had ~2 months to build this base of knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are a student in this situation, it is still possible to compensate, as I will discuss later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, in my opinion, if a student is actively working on a research project before they take the qualifying exam, it provides a tremendous advantage because they have something to write and talk about.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Secondly, I cannot overemphasize the importance of maintaining good grades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember that at the meeting where your case will be discussed, every faculty member in the department will see the grade and class ranking for every class you have taken at Illinois.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Therefore, even if your instructor for graduate-level courses was an easy grader, all the faculty will still know how you performed compared to everyone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In graduate level courses, you may find that grading is on a different scale than what you may have been used to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By graduate school, all of the students are already excellent, so most grades are A’s and B’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Earning a C in a class is almost equivalent to a failing grade, reserved for students who clearly were not doing the work or preparing for exams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is rare for a student with excellent grades to fail the qualifying exam, but students whose grade point average is 3.5 or below (earning half A’s and half B’s) will be scrutinized more thoroughly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When a student is up for discussion, faculty generally know how the student performed in their class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was the student someone who participated actively and asked a lot of good questions in class, someone who showed good intellectual curiosity at office hours, or was he/she someone who rarely attended?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These types of things always come up, and help paint a picture of the student.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While it is not necessary for a student to have a near-perfect GPA to pass the qual, it is not wise to do poorly in class at the expense of spending every waking moment in the lab.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is truly important to achieve a balance.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The new written part of the qual, in which the student is required to prepare a short paper describing their research, is your chance to show that you have been studying the background literature surrounding your research topic, and gaining a solid understanding of the important issue that impact your work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The exam committee members will have read your paper before the oral exam, so the paper serves to introduce yourself to the committee before they even meet you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The oral presentation will generally follow the outline of the paper, presenting the same information, so the paper serves to help students with poor presentation skills, since there is no time limit on preparing a good paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, there are a number of pitfalls to avoid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Make sure the paper is logically organized, written with proper English, and that all equations and figures are clearly easy to understand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Student’s thesis advisors are not really supposed to edit and rewrite the paper, but it occurs occasionally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually the committee can tell when something has been written by a professor rather than by a second year graduate student.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of asking your advisor to edit your paper, ask a senior graduate student in your group, or a student who is a strong writer to proofread your paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember that some of the faculty in your area will be totally unfamiliar with your research area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is extremely important to explain things clearly, as if you are trying to educate someone who is learning about your area for the first time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Errors such as failure to define variables in equations, using highly specialized jargon, failure to label axis on graphs, and failure to put size scale bars on images will drive your committee crazy, and you will always get negative comments for doing these things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a page limit on length of the paper that should never be exceeded for any reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More is definitely NOT better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may think that you are showing enthusiasm by having paper that is three times longer than the page limit, but what this really shows is a lack of ability to describe complex concepts in a concise manner, and an inability to follow directions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your advisor may be asked how much of the paper is the student’s own work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have seen instanced in which the text of a student’s qual paper was lifted directly from journal papers from the thesis advisor’s published papers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You should avoid doing this – the paper should represent your own words, and any technical descriptions taken from other work should be referenced.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Next, let’s discuss the presentation itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though this part is what students worry about the most, it is really only ~1/5 of everything that goes into the exam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just like the paper, the presentation should be logically organized (with an outline, and sections like “Introduction,” “Background,” “Methods,” “Results,” and “Conclusion.”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just like the paper, all the vugraphs should be clear to read (hint – use large fonts – your professors are old and can’t see that well!), all the variables should be defined, all the axis should be labeled, and all the images should have scale bars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The presentation is meant to take 20 minutes, so you should definitely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> try to deliver 60 slides in that amount of time (I have seen some students try).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You should PRACTICE.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In front of other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If a student has given a conference presentation on their research, they often use the same material in their qualifying exam presentation, but for some students the qual may be the first presentation that they have ever delivered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The members of your research group are extremely valuable resources because they can serve as your practice audience, and point out areas where your presentation was not clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is also a great idea to have your friends throw questions at you, to give you the opportunity to think and answer on your feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though your talk should last for 20 minutes when it is not interrupted, the faculty on your committee are definitely going to ask you many questions, resulting in you presentation lasting for approximately 60 minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The committee expects you to know about everything that is in your presentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you present an equation that you do not completely understand (for example how to derive it, or its physical meaning) or if you describe background information that you have not thoroughly studied, you are asking for trouble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Favorite questions by the faculty might be “tell me more about that technique you that the competing research group is using” or “where does that equation come from” or “what would happen if …”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These types of questions are meant to determine whether you truly understand the material that you are presenting, or whether you just copied it down from somewhere.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A word of advice for students who may have been working with their advisor for only a short time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is perfectly acceptable to mention this fact to your committee as you begin your presentation, by way of introducing your self.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might start your presentation with a statement like: “Hello, my name is Joe Genius.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thanks for serving on my exam committee.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I started working with my current thesis advisor, Prof. Andrea Wickedsmart, at the start of this semester.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prof. Wickedsmart’s group does research in the area of fabric based invisibility cloaks, and my project will be to more fully develop the fabrication processes for building optical nanostructures into the fabric.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my presentation today, I will briefly summarize the current state of knowledge around these invisibility cloaks, and describe the plan that Prof. Wickedsmart and I have developed for fabricating the nanostructures over large surface areas.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This kind of statement (with the names changed of course) will serve to set the expectations that the committee will have for your presentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have not been working on the research project for long enough to have new results of your own, but you are going to show them that you understand the current state of the art, some of the fundamental theory of operation, and that you have developed a plan for your research going forward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To prepare, you should be studying journal literature very intensely, and asking your advisor (and senior graduate students in your group) a lot of questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your classwork hopefully would be serving to build your background knowledge to help you understand the literature around your research topic.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The way that you handle questions about your presentation is probably more important than the prepared part of the talk, and this is where the greatest danger lies for failing the qual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though you are giving the presentation about your research project, the committee is going to try to find out how you translate material that you learned from class into your research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the members of your exam committee will be faculty who know your research area very well, or they may be faculty who taught one of your previous classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is extremely important to be able to show the committee that you retained and can use the most basic principles that you learned in class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If, for example, a student is working on a project that relies heavily on the use of electromagnetic theory, it is not uncommon for the committee to try to find out how strong the student is in electormagnetism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might be asked to write one of Maxwell’s equations on the white board, or to write the equation for a propagating electromagnetic wave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyone who is working with electromagntics should, in principle, be able to do that!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might be asked how you would analyze a particular situation (such as what happens when an electromagnetic wave encounters a boundary between two dielectrics, or what happens when light is scattered inside a tissue).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The questions are usually tangentially related to the research topic, but emphasize the basics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is best to be able to not just wave your arms, but to be prepared to write down from memory some of the basic equations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many students fail to do this, and the faculty always shake their heads and say “I can’t believe that students working in this area can’t remember the (fill in the blank) equation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is fundamental to everything they are doing!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Students working on transistors get asked transistor questions, while students working on lasers get asked laser questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no way to know in advance what question you will be asked, so this is where it is important to study and to be prepared in advance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being able to recall and apply even a simple concept from your former instructor’s class will make them incredibly happy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Often, the committee tries to find the boundaries of your knowledge, to discover what you DON’T know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this case, the committee might lead with a simple question, and then start diving into more and more detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You should not be nervous about this, but just do the best that you can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don’t know, it is better to say that you don’t know, or to outline how you would approach the problem, rather than to try to fake it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually, the committee will give hints about how to think about it, to see if you can make connections to the next step.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is definitely not a good idea to say things like “that question is not fair,” or “you can’t be serious” although I have seen that happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In one instance, a very senior faculty member asked a large number of questions, starting out with deep ones, and then making the questions simpler and simpler until the student could answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could tell that the student was totally flustered, and was so nervous that he could not think clearly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though the exam seemed like a disaster, after the exam was over the faculty member said “I thought he did pretty well!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember that it is normal to be asked questions that might be beyond what you know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are strong in the fundamentals and can show it, you will fare well in the scoring.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So as you can see, there is unfortunately no magical easy way to pass the quals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Performing well requires a great deal of preparation, some long-term dedication to your research topic, and the ability to display that you have retained some fundamental principles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The exam also requires students to work on learning how to write clearly and how to prepare an effective presentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe that it really focuses students to work on developing the same skills that they will need to be a successful researcher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><!--EndFragment-->Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8067354570875344676.post-84370406023015316352010-01-18T09:17:00.000-06:002010-01-18T09:17:55.153-06:00Introduction to the Blog<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">As long as I can remember, I have been able to do my best thinking while I walk around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In college, I used to pace up and down the hallways of my fraternity house while I memorized notes and equations for exams, and I would go out for long walks around the University of Illinois campus to clear my head, think about my goals, and make plans of action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For me, getting away from the television, phone, my roommate, and the refrigerator were the best way to create an environment that would let me have those deep, and sometimes not-so-deep thoughts.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">One such walk around campus during my freshman year at Illinois still sticks in my memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most often, I would take my “thinking walks” after dark, so there were not very many people around. I walked from my dormitory (Hendrick House), over the top of the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (which is perfectly legal, since there are walkways that go over the building!) and over to the Quad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since it was a beautiful evening, and all the campus buildings were lit up, I stopped and sat down in the grass in the middle of the Quad and looked around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought to myself: “What is it that I want to accomplish here at the University of Illinois?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I am done, what is it that I want to be able to say that I did?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At that time, I was enrolled in the General Engineering program, mostly because I knew I wanted to be an engineer, but was not really sure what kind of engineering I would like the best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“General” Engineering seemed like a good way to keep my options open, because it was, well, general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So at that point, I still did not really know what I wanted to be when I grew up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I decided that night was that I wanted to get to the top of the University of Illinois, and to be the best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What that meant to me at that time was to find the area of engineering that would have the biggest impact on society, and to be the best possible student of that topic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was interested in Genetic Engineering because of all the great and interesting things that genetics promised, but back in my freshman year (1982), a student could not really major in that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also thought that computers would be a big deal in the future, and so shortly after that walk, I decided to major in Computer Engineering, and to try my hardest to get perfect grades in that topic.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I got older, I began to realize that “getting to the top” would mean more than getting the best grades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was such a thing as graduate school, where you could earn higher degrees of academic accomplishment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Initially, I had absolutely no intention of going to graduate school, since I was paying most of my own way through college, and I did not especially enjoy being broke all the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though a smart student could get a stipend in graduate school to pay for tuition and living expenses, I knew a lot of people who were graduating with their Bachelors degrees in engineering and getting several job offers with pretty high-sounding salaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, besides my professors, I had never even met someone who had a PhD in any topic, and had no idea what the extra training would mean to my career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will write more later about reasons for choosing to go to graduate school, but for now, let me just say that I did go, and earned my PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1990, approximately 8 years after my fateful evening walk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had finally reached the “top.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or had I?<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">After finishing my PhD, I had absolutely no desire to ever be a professor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After having deferred joining the real world for 4 years of graduate school, I was anxious to make my way in industry, and start earning a living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After four years of graduate school, I now knew many people with PhDs (professors, alumni, and people I would meet at scientific conferences), but I did not have a strong idea of what faculty did with most of their time, why it was important, or how you could become a professor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I pretty much had tunnel vision for my classes, my research project, my social life, getting married, and finding a job.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Later in the blog, I will talk more about why and how to become a professor, but again, just take my word for it that I did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I worked in industry for 15 years after my PhD, and then joined the faculty at the University of Illinois in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in 2004.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During that time, I still liked doing a lot of my thinking while walking around, but I had also taken up cycling<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>during the time I lived in the Boston area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So one of the first things that I did after my family moved into our new house in Champaign, IL was to take my bike out for an early morning ride.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since there is not too much to see around central Illinois besides corn and soybeans, my trip led me to campus, where again I parked myself in the center of the Quad to think.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one thing, I could not believe that they let me come back to my old school to be a professor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was quite sure that every other faculty member in the department must be more intelligent than I was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was somewhat nervous about teaching class in the upcoming Fall semester, since I had not taken or taught a class in 15 years, and so much had happened during that time that I could barely remember what it was like to be a student.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Looking around, I realized that there were only a handful of people on campus who even knew who I was, and that it would take a lot of effort to establish myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To start with, I was an Associate Professor without tenure, who had never written a grant application to NSF or NIH.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What would it take to reach the “top” now, and how would I know when I got there?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody had ever really explained to me how a person earns tenure at a top-5 research university.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I figured that I would find out along the way, and that if I turned out to be a lousy professor, I would find a job back in Industry doing something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">I did have some things going for me after all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During my time in the “real world,” I had the opportunity to do hands-on learning of the methods used in making microelectronic circuits, and ways for adapting those methods toward making highly miniature sensors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I learned how to manage large research projects and to organize the efforts of diverse groups of technicians, engineers, and scientists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had taken classes in biology and business, and was one of the few people who had translated a new biological sensor technology into a commercial product.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had founded a startup company, through which I had the opportunity to interact closely with hundreds of scientists and managers at pharmaceutical companies and the companies that make tools for biology research.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had never taught a class, but I had given hundreds of seminars, marketing pitches, investor presentations, and inter-company presentations about my company’s technology. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did not have the same number of scientific journal manuscripts to my name as most of my faculty colleagues, but I had dozens of patents and a product that was being adopted by some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, later in the blog, I will write more about the process of earning full professor status, but let me here just say that I did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At last I had reached the top of the academic pyramid!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once again, I am not so sure.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">There were several reasons that I chose to become a professor, but the main ones are related to what I thought about during my freshman year evening walk on the Quad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To do something in my career that makes an impact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To do something with my time here on earth that will make a difference to somebody.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are lots of ways that an engineer can make a positive difference in the world, but I can say from experience that an engineer can be extremely smart and extremely hard-working, and not have a chance to see their work make the difference that they expected, or not be able to reap the benefit from it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Things happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Projects get cancelled, another company comes out with better technology, a competitor has a much stronger marketing campaign, your company gets merged with another company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The list of possibilities for things to go wrong is pretty long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My goal, as a professor, would be to work on the more fundamental things – the things with broad far-reaching implications, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that could not simply fall victim to poor management or the whims of the marketplace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In particular, my goal as a professor is to work on technologies that can make an impact on human health and well-being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tools that can help discover new drug treatments, or diagnostic tests that can help identify a disease at an early, treatable stage are the kinds of projects that motivate me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other way that I felt my work as a professor would make a lasting impact would be to work with students, and to help them get a strong start in their careers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arguably, training the next generation of scientific leaders and helping them to develop the tools that they will need to be innovative can have a greater overall impact than any one thing that I can work on myself.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">As a professor, one of my goals has been to share what I have learned from my experiences with my graduate students, undergraduate advisees, and my class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One thing that I have found pretty amusing since I became a professor is that a lot of people suddenly actually wanted my opinion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I started to become inundated with requests to serve on proposal review panels for grant agencies throughout the world, to review journal articles, to give talks at conferences, to share my experience on discussion panels, to take leadership positions in technical societies, and to write chapters in textbooks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was still the same person that I was before, but I now worked for an institution that actively encouraged professional service and sharing of knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also found that, in order to teach classes effectively, I was forced to dig back and understand the fundamentals again, and that activities such as preparing lectures, making exam problems, and inventing new homework questions were helping me to regain the technical edge that I felt was getting weaker from my time in Industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another amusing change from industry to academia was that, while in industry I was very often speaking with investors, customers, and business partners who were always very skeptical about anything I had to say, questioning practically every word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suddenly, as a professor, it seemed like most students thought that I must know everything, and assumed that everything I said had to be true!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, many excellent students ask very insightful questions, and the rigors of the peer review process make sure that all our scientific conclusions are well-supported.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have found that many students have the same questions that I had when I was a student, and that as I advise more students, I find myself repeating many of the same stories and lessons. Questions such as “what is the best way to prepare for the PhD qualifying exam” or “how should I go about preparing to write my first journal article” or “how to prepare to give a great conference presentation” or “what is expected of me as a graduate student” are critical to the success in graduate school, but I saw that many students receive very little guidance from their advisors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have also had many talks with postdoctorate researchers and assistant professors about topics that include “how to prepare a strong NSF proposal,” “what is involved in writing a patent application” or “how did you go about starting a company?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">While I cannot claim to be an authoritative expert on all these topics, I am happy to share my thoughts and experiences, for what they are worth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The purpose of this blog is to write about topics that might be of general interest to engineering graduate students, post-docs, and faculty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The blog represents my own opinions and perspectives, and therefore whatever I say is not necessary a law, such as the laws of physics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you read something in this blog that you do not agree with, I welcome your constructive thoughts and comments by email.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you have found something that I have written to be useful, I of course welcome your positive comments as well!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I travel to scientific meetings, I also plan to write about some of the most interesting/cool/exciting technical developments that I come across in the areas of biophotonics, nanotechnology, sensors, and more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The good thing about a blog is that I can write about whatever I am most interested in, and as readers, you can choose to read about the topics that are useful to you, while skipping the rest.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Starting out as a new professor, I found a few books to be helpful for understanding the demands of the job, developing a teaching philosophy, and developing strong proposals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can highly recommend the following books:<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Phillip C. Wankat, “The effective, efficient professor: Teaching, scholarship, and service,” Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, MA, 2002.<br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Nihil Nimus, “Advice for new faculty members,” Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, MA ,2000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>Richard M. Reis, “Tomorrow’s professor: Preparing for academic careers in science and engineering,” IEEE Press, , Wiley Interscience, New York, NY, 1997.<br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Cambria; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium;">4. Walter H. Gmelch, “Coping with faculty stress: Survival skills for scholars,” SAGE Publications, Newbury Park, CA, 1993.</span></span></span></span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Happy Reading!<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Copyright © 2010, Brian T. Cunningham<br />
</div><!--EndFragment-->Brian T. Cunninghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04729184941216891750noreply@blogger.com