Having a public presence is not optional. Tell the world whenever you write academic papers, release open-source software, and so on. My actual supervisor was amazing, and always made time for me – but unfortunately we worked in slightly different fields, so his expertise wasn’t always aligned with what I needed. In my case, my mentor figure took the nebulous autodidactical form of “the internet”, and in particular the machine learning subreddit. If you can, have a discussion first – ideally you both have something in common anyway. This mentor figure may be from outside your research group!Ĭold emailing other academics with “I’ve read your papers X, Y, and Z, and would you like to collaborate?” works ~10% of the time. Passing these research ideas on to competent junior collaborators is an opportunity for them to increase their own portfolio of publications, without them taking on too much extra work. Likewise, anyone with any kind of seniority will have a surplus of ideas and too little time to pursue them.A lot of people in this position want to eventually leading teams or research groups themselves, and would love to grow their leadership experience by taking on informal mentoring arrangements.But if you need an alternative, then a senior PhD student or postdoc can be a great person to reach out to. Ideally this is supposed to your supervisor, of course. You will probably need a mentor figure, who knows the literature better than you do, and who can suggest research directions. On that note… Contact senior PhD students or postdocs Locating these kinds of problems can be made much easier by finding a mentor figure. It successfully distracted me writing my thesis for a couple of months. I think that trying to locate the appropriate abstractions for this, and finding computationally efficient implementations, is just such a cool technical problem. The driving force for much of my recent work was the desire to write a new unified system of differential equation solvers in JAX. Then go and do that.ĭuring my PhD I changed topic twice before finding what was right for me. Ask yourself what gets you up in the morning. When the going gets tough – and it will – being fundamentally invested in your topic will be what pulls you through.Īnd if you don’t feel that invested in your current topic? Pick a new topic. What I wrote was: find problems that you want to solve.ĭoing a PhD isn’t a job. Find problems you want to solveįor this heading, I didn’t write “find low hanging fruit” or “find difficult problems”. It’s always going to be down to you to ensure that you succeed. This sucks, but is essentially no different to life in general. So expect to work hard – harder than your peers have to – teaching yourself, promoting yourself, attending conferences yourself, finding collaborators by yourself, and so on. It would have been nice if your supervisor were there to support you more, but they aren’t. Mindset: this is your PhDįirst of all, take ownership of your PhD. For those who need it, here’s a crash-course on pursuing research independently from your supervisor. (Later-stage PhD students should absolutely be able to come up with own research agenda, though.) A better plan is to give an early-stage student some problems to work on in doing so they can develop both their problem-solving skills and the depth of their own knowledge. That isn’t something most early-stage PhD students possess yet. I believe ideation stems mostly from possessing a technical depth of knowledge. That last one in particular sounds completely backwards to me. Occasionally I’ve even heard of some supervisors refusing to give problems to early-stage PhD students because they “want the student to practice coming up with ideas”. Or your supervisor may have taken on more students than they can handle – this is a common failing of many CS professors. Your supervisor may be in a slightly different field to you (this was the case for me). Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Your supervisor should have handed you a few problems to cut your teeth on. If you’ve started a PhD then you probably already have a topic and a supervisor. How to handle a hands-off supervisor < Back to "Thoughts" | Posted on June 10, 2022
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