Characteristics of the Worst Graduate Students

In a previous blog post, I talked about what the characteristics of the best graduate students.  But what about the “bad” ones?  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!  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.  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!

I’ll start by saying how fortunate I have been to work with so many truly outstanding and inspirational graduate students.  These are young people who are innovative, self-starting, hard-working, honest, collaborative, optimistic, aspirational, and hungry for success.  Those characteristics truly describe 90-95% of all the graduate students that I have ever advised.  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.  (For example:  Wife: “Brian, how was your day?”  Me: “Oh, pretty good!  Leo got some great results in the lab today, and one of Meng’s papers just got accepted in a really tough journal.”  My Kids (in my dreams): “Dad, how incredible!  Tell us more about how you helped cure cancer today?!?!”  My Kids (in reality): “How boring! Can we change the subject to something besides Dad’s work?!?”)  No.  The really interesting dinner conversations occur when one of outlier students is doing something incredibly annoying.  Over the course of 10 years as a professor, there have probably been ~3 students who failed due to problems they brought upon themselves.  None of them will ever have a PhD thesis with my signature on it.  So, how does a person get on this list?

Don’t come in to work: 

It’s simple.  If you are not at the lab, you cannot get any research done.  I have had students who I would rarely ever see, even though my office door was only 15 feet away from their desk.  During normal work hours, I would never see them in the lab.  If I stopped by the office at night or the weekend, I could not find them either.  When I meet with them every week, and ask what they did, they would have very little to show.  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.  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.

Another serious problem is someone who treats graduate school like they work at a bank.  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.  Really, a person should be trying to work between 8-10 hours per day in graduate school.   Some people will do more than this for some stretches for a critical experiment or a deadline.  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.  Try coming into work at 8AM, working until noon, taking an hour for lunch, and then stay at work until 6PM.  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. 

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.  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.  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.  My advice is to try avoiding being a nocturnal person (like a vampire) who works from 10PM to 8AM.  My students who tell me that they do this seem to be a lot less productive than those who expose themselves to daylight.

Come into work, but don’t work:

          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.  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.  One day, out of curiosity, I walked up behind him at his desk to see what he was working on.  Was he reading journal papers, researching some information to help him solve a problem, emailing his mother?  No, it was Facebook!  Basically, every time I saw his computer screen after that, he was spouting nonsense to his friends back in his home country.  He made the mistake of friending me, so I unfortunately got exposed to all the various posts made throughout the day.  My advice: save the video games and social media playtime for outside the office, and focus on work while you are at work.

          In a similar vein, another student always seemed to be on the phone during work.  There may have been some kind of complex family situation, a side business, or something that required a lot of loud arguments.  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.  Very rude.)  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.  Sometimes it is necessary, but it should be the exception, and not the rule.

Refuse to work with other people:

          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.  He felt that asking one of the senior students in the group for advice was a sign of weakness.  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.  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.  People also learned that they could never rely on him for lending a hand with anything, and so eventually they stopped asking.  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.

Antagonize your fellow group members, so all of them refuse to work with you:

          An antagonistic personality will also serve to isolate a student from the rest of the group.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  Rudeness and aggressiveness rarely gets you the results you want with your co-workers in any context.

Antagonize students in groups I collaborate with, so their groups refuse to work with my group:

          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.  Unfortunately this also included students from other professors who I collaborated with.  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.  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.

Break things by being stupid, and fail to take part in fixing them:

          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.  How did he manage to do this?  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.  During the first time he was allowed to operate the equipment solo, he encountered an unexpected message.  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.  30 minutes later, the machine was ruined.  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.  This postdoc’s behavior (in this instance and other related ones related to safety) got him permanently banned from the lab.

Get banned from the lab:

          If you are banned from the lab, it is very hard to make research progress.  The person mentioned above actually got banned from another lab for breaking yet another piece of equipment.  I think he is the only person to ever be permanently banned from two labs at Illinois.  I ended up having to pay for all his damage from my grant funding.  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.

Blame all your problems on everything except yourself:

          Sometimes, when things are not going well, people seek to identify the source of their problems.  Problems are not hard to find, and some common ones are: 

“My advisor did not tell me exactly what to do.”

“My equipment did not work.”

“I did not get the result I expected.”

“I did not know how to perform a technique.”

“I needed some piece of equipment, and I did not have it.”

“I did not know what other people already knew about this topic.”

“My classes are giving me too much homework this semester.”

One of the most important characteristics of successful researchers is resourcefulness, and this is a very important lesson to learn. 

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.  It will be up to you to get input and direction from your advisor, but to use your resourcefulness to fill in the rest.  Not sure what to do?  Then talk with some other members of your group, and develop a written plan that you can review with your advisor.  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.  Don’t know how to perform a technique?  You may need to take a class, attend a workshop, or get someone to show you how to do it correctly.  Need a key piece of equipment?  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.  Not sure how others have approached this problem in the past?  Go to Google Scholar and read up on some published scientific literature.  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.

          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.  Science is hard, and this is part of the learning experience!

Fail to draft a paper on your research:

          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.  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.

Need to know EVERYTHING before you can do ANYTHING:

          This issue can trip up people who are perfectionists.  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.  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!  Another example:  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!  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.  Typically, people can gather information on the fundamentals while simultaneously making practical progress in the lab.  It is a parallel process rather than a serial one.

          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.  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.  Good luck!!!

Gaining Attention for Your Research - The Art of Self Promotion

Brian T. Cunningham

July, 2013

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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!

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.

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.

What exactly do professors DO all day?

What exactly do professors DO all day?

Brian T. Cunningham

May 31, 2013

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.

Teaching.  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.  

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!

Committees:  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. 

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.

Reviewing Stuff:  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.

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.

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.

Recommendation Letter Writing:  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 also 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 long 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!

Advising my Graduate Students:  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. 

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.  My 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!

Founding a Startup Company:  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.

Administrative Responsibilities:  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.

Writing Journal Manuscripts:  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. 

Writing Grant Applications – 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.

Meetings, Meeting, Meetings:  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.

Administrative – getting bit by a million mosquitos = being sucked dry by one big vampire!  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 real 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.

Travel:  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.

Answering Email:  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).

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.

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