Automated Software Engineering Research Group @NCSU

How to meet your advisor?

In my view, the major purposes of individual (i.e., one-on-one) meetings include several parts:
(a). Keep the advisor informed on some research details (either the work being done the period before the meeting or the work to be done in the next time period) so that the advisor can give advice or guidance on them
(b). Brainstorm new research ideas and get feedback from the advisor
(c). Allow the advisor to know that you are making progress and going on the right direction/track.
(d). Any other things that the student wants to talk to the advisor (like general career advice, things that happened recently in the group, department, and the research field)

The first advice for students on meeting the advisor is "do sufficient preparation before your meeting with your advisor". I can tell that some students sometimes didn't prepare for their meeting with me. They came in my office and didn't have a meeting agenda in mind. After they used one or two sentences very briefly to inform me what they have done and they are going to do, they stopped and had no specific things to talk about during the rest of the meeting.

Students should list about things to be discussed in mind or in paper. In my early day's meeting with my advisor, I brought in printed hardcopy slides or some note printout. In the beginning of the meeting material, I put a list of items to be discussed if there are more than one item. I have thought carefully how to make full usage of the 30 mins (later 45 mins or 60 mins) that my advisor allocated for me. I usually spent some non-trivial time in preparing materials for my meeting with my advisor (this preparation could also help me to organize the work being done in the passing week and plan out what I am going to do in the next week).

There are two general types of students in terms of their style of meeting the advisor:
1. Have not much to say during the meeting with the advisor
2. Have too much to say during the meeting with the advisor

The first type is more common, I think. Many students often cannot use up the time slot allocated for them (either 1 hour, 30 mins, or 15 mins). They don't seem to have much to say with the advisor. I think a wise student should take full advantage of the allocated time slots.

For both types, the high-level quesiton that the students should ask themselves is: "What do you want from your advisor during this meeting?" Your advisor also had the same question "what do you want from me?". This question would be especially helpful for the second type of students. Usually the second type of students wants to expose to the advisor every tiny detail of the work that they have done or every tiny detail that they are going to do. If a student usually finds that he or she cannot finish the meeting within the time slot, there are two options: one is to request a longer time slot if the student finds that he or she has indeed important things to talk to the advisor, and the other is to rethink whether some of the stuffs that the student is telling are important for the advisor to give advice. That is, after the student explains the tiny details, would he or she expect the advisor to give specific useful advice? Or would the student expect certain advice on the tiny details? If not, than probably the student doesn't need to explain that levels of details to the advisor. One downside faced by the second type of students is that when a student overwelms the meeting with so many tiny details, the big picture is lost and the advisor may lose the opportunity and time to talk to the student on high level more important things.

The first type of students is way more common. They tend to keep many research details to themselve, not discussing these details with the advisor; this way may be acceptable or even preferable when the students are in a late stage that they can have quite high confidence of doing **right** things in **right** ways independently. Then they can focus on high level big pictures and other high level things during their meetings with their advisor. In my late stages of my Ph.D. program, I pretty much go for this way. But for students in early stages, they should discuss more research details with the advisor. One way to fix this issue of not much to say is to do more preparation before the meeting, as mentioned earlier! Before the meeting, think about what you want to disucss to use up the allocated time slot!

Another possible reason that some students have not much to say is that they are busy with their course work and other legitimate things, not being able to spend much time on developing the reseach project or making enough progress; this situation occurs very often when students are in their early stage, taking non-trivial course load. The advisor would often show understanding on the situation. But that doesn't mean that students would skip the meeting or have not much to say in the meeting. In my early stages of Ph.D. program, I didn't or couldn't spend a lot of time in developing research projects, partly because of taking courses and partly because of lack of good research ideas to work on (I struggled on coming up good reseach ideas for quite a while in my early stage of my Ph.D. program). But I still kept routine meetings with my advisor, talking about ideas that I have, talking about my understanding of some papers, talking about other things ... Of course, I needed to spend time on preparing for such meetings especially when the meeting didn't focus on speciifc research details that I developed.

In my Ph.D. program, when I had a meeting with my advisor, I wouldn't leave till I used up all the time allocated to my meeting. When I finished technical parts, if some time still remains, I would talk to my advisor on non-technical, causual stuffs like research community, high level career advice, the advisor's view on certain things, ...

In summary, I hope students can use up and take full advantage of their meeting time slots with the advisor.

Posted at 11:42PM Apr 26, 2007 by XIE, TAO in Research Skills  |  Comments[2]