Okay. We’ll be working together on a project. Great. These are some things I’ll be looking out for -
Communication – I think every successful collaboration really boils down to communicating well. And this is something where our instincts can massively fail us. I’ve been a douche in the past in matters regarding communication. And i’ve learnt to be better. When in doubt, communicate. If you’re stuck on something you think is trivial, communicate. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, communicate. If you missed a milestone we agreed upon, communicate. If you want more time to run some analysis, communciate. If you think i’m being unreasonable about something … you get the drift. Effective communication can make or break a collaboration. And it is oddly against our instincts to have tough conversations, where either we’re coming off as being inadequate, or we’re pointing some shortcoming in someone else. But what works almost always is going ahead and actually communicating it. See an example below where I dwell on this point a little more.
Sincerity with your work – I find this important as well. Once you’ve decided to learn more and invest effort on some work, please start owning it. Do not expect to be followed up and parented on the progress you make.
I respect and will expect you to be fiercly proud of the quality of the work you produce—another way to exercise sincerity in the work you do.
Do not settle for mediocrity in your output. Care for every little detail in your work. Naturally, achieving such rigor in your work will take a lot of effort—it will require you to work hard, think hard, and be fully engaged with your work. It will also demand a high degree of tenacity when faced with problems which initially may seem hard. I will expect you to demonstrate these traits—doing so will train you to be a world-class engineer or researcher, which is the standard I will want you to aspire to meet.
Again, in this process, if you think you’re stuck, or are unable to appreciate and understand nuances, or are not motivated any more - read point 1. above. Communicate this as early as possible.
Please also read this note by Prof. Jason Eisner which concretizes how you can be sincere with your work.
Having said that, we could be perfectly well motivated but then shirk off work at times. That’s fine as well! We all tend to be lazy at times. Heck, I constantly struggle with it myself. The trick again is to convey - convey that you won’t be able to make progress on a given week (for whatever reason; I usually don’t care), and make sure you make up for it in subsequent weeks.
If things are being constantly delayed, I’ll likely notice it and will bring this up in a conversation with you.
Be nice – no one likes to work with jerks. If you believe that you really know and understand the world a lot better than most of us, and are proud of it and would like to show this off at every instance - good luck! Unlikely we’ll work together.
You’ll notice, I didn’t list out skills like math, doing research (?), etc. Those skills can be learnt. It’s unlikely you will have these relevant skills if you are just starting off. That’s what a research project will teach you. However, if it’s a “strong personality”/ego/whatever that comes in your way of communicating and owning up when you’re stuck, clarifying a misunderstanding, or wanting to know more, then that’s unfortunate. That will make it all the more harder for you to learn new things while having fun. My goal is to see you morph into an independent researcher who can frame and tackle interesting problems (if you aren’t there already!). We will work to get you to ask the right questions, be critical of the work you read, and learn how systematic research is done. Oftentimes, all it requires is thinking carefully about breaking seemingly large problems into manageable chunks.
Additionally, and importantly, the purpose of writing out these points is not to talk you down and set out “ground rules” - the idea here is to share how I view this world, and what works for me. If you are intimidated by all these points, please refer to point 1 :-) I assure you my intention is well meaning than any thing else.
To drive home my point on the importance of communication, here’s a little story. I had a project partner on a research project we had agreed to work on. They had most likely over-committed themselves to this work, and likely did not have the time and bandwidth to carry through with it.
What would you do in such a situation?
My younger self would have ghosted me. That is, I would have gone into a shell and would not have wanted to have this uncomfortable conversation about my lapse in estimating my work load.
This is exactly what happened - they soon stopped responding to emails a couple of weeks into our project.
A consequence of this is they probably messed up a working relationship which could’ve matured and led to subsequent fruitful collaborations. But what’s worse is they derailed an existing plan of action that was set out for the project. By not communicating clearly, they had put the onus of figuring out whether they were involved or not on me. And that’s unfair to everyone involved.
Once the project had ended, I had a conversation with them explaining the situation. I reproduce here the email I wrote them before having a face to face meeting where we discussed these points. The purpose of reproducing it here is to share with you how I think about this situation.
Subject: Feedback on our project
hey
i wanted to share some feedback from our work over the course of our project.
while i share this feedback with you, i drop the hat of being a fellow student, and put on that of a manager having managed teams for a while in the industry and a slightly older colleague. i convey to you a sliver of my learning from being in similar situations before.
i think you handled communication poorly. there was an expectation of what each would pick up and work on. you seemed to have over-committed yourself to multiple other projects, which naturally made spending time on this hard. that’s perfectly understandable. however, the rookie mistake to do in such cases is to go into a shell, and not convey these critical bits of information to others involved. this, in my opinion, is where things generally begin to go horribly wrong.
in our case, we just knew you had this engagement XX. what we didn’t know was how much time you’d be able to spend on this project. this ought to have been clearly conveyed. even if this meant simply saying, in perhaps the first week of joining the group - “folks, i just don’t have time to do any heavy-lifting. given my situation, let’s work on defining something which i can perhaps put 10 hours into in total and achieve”. doing something like this would have dramatically changed the equation of how things worked out. instead, the approach that unfolded was you awkwardly just ignored confronting this aspect, expecting us to understand your situation and be accommodating.
here’s my take on the essentials of working in a group -
as disarmingly simple this above maxim seems, it is practiced by very few i know. this is unfortunately never taught to us formally, and we learn it through a rather bitter set of experiences.
but there’s a brighter side to this - everyone does this. i did it at some point. and it’s something we consciously can learn to undo.
i also understand that it might have been unsettling for you to have been involved in a project disconnected from your primary research interest, made worse by the rest throwing around jargon. having said that, i think the above points i share are disconnected to it. being in a situation where you’re the one with little background is totally expected in teams, and will likely happen to you again. what’s critical is being sincere in letting everyone know your constraints. (case in point - you’ll be surprised by the kind of dumb things i asked XX about javascript. it perhaps made me look like a genuine fool. i’ll live with that as long as work got done as expected.)
again, while i share this brief feedback with you, my point is not to undermine your effort or intention, or rub off a grudge for not being involved, or any such child-like emotion. in the larger scheme of things, the effort on this project doesn’t really matter.
what matters to me personally is you go on to be a great scientist and an engineer. and from what little i have seen, these things go a long way in making one, besides being just plain smart.
further, what i also have realized is that these little things are not often formally conveyed to folks, because of which they are oblivious of such shortcomings. it would do both, you and me, a disservice if i did not share this critical feedback with you and simply instead shied away from having this awkward interaction. it is very likely that you will be in a similar situation in the near future in some other team, where the nature of work may be much more critical than what it was in our case.
i’m not sure how XX feels about this. i encourage you to chat with them and understand their opinion.
i thought i should share with you my observations. i’d have ideally loved to do this face to face with you, but i have a hectic day today and tomorrow, and there’s only so much effect a delayed feedback has.
please let me know your thoughts. if you’re not a fan of typing out replies, i would love to meet and chat over a cup of coffee.
my best to you. shashank
If we have worked together, it is likely I’ll share this little questionnaire with you. This is for you to reflect on how you did, and what more you want of this experience. The point here is to be as painfully detailed as possible. Try to list out every little thing you can remember. This will help take stock of the big picture, and help us appreciate what you learnt, and what more we can do to improve your research experience.
Also, since you’ll be filling this up at the end of a term, make sure you log your work consistently to help you recollect these details. Let this not be a last-day exercise for you to fill up right before we meet to discuss this.