Advice on making submission deadlines
I found that some students who are supposed to drive their research and
preparation of a certain submission draft are not active or responsive enough. Below is my advice on dealing with the issue.
1. Students
need to early on take full advantage of the advisor and other colleagues (in
the co-author list) in helping improve the draft and the work. As I told
students in our group, students should write the whole draft (when there are
peer colleagues/students in the co-author list of your paper, you may coordinate with
them to ask them to write some sections of the paper). Enforcing students to
write all sections can help train their capability of independently writing
the whole draft. Of course, the advisor will help you by giving you
suggestions on how to revise your draft.
That doesn't mean that you need
to submit your draft for your advisor to review only after you finish the
whole draft. It is great if you can finish your draft very early on and send
your whole draft to your advisor. But more commonly many students feel tight in making their
drafts ready.
Then the students need to make efforts to gather early
feedback from the advisor by giving section by section to the advisor for
review comments and feedback if they cannot prepare their full draft early
on. Like in bug finding, the earlier that a bug is detected, the better off
you will be in fixing the bug.
In all, try to get early feedback from
the advisor or co-authors incrementally with available sections early on
rather than putting off sending your writing to them very near the deadline.
In the latter case, the advisor may not have enough time and you may not be able to
incorporate the feedback to improve the draft.
2. Students need to be
**responsive** to the advisor or colleagues. Responding
your advisor's emails should be on the top priority if your advisor's emails
explicitly asked for responses with questions. As you can see, I always give
rapid response to students and colleagues. As I discussed in the group
meeting, in some other groups either inside or outside NCSU, students may
complain that their advisor is slow in responding their emails. In our
group, the other way around happens often, believe it or not!
If you
are too busy and cannot spend time on some task mentioned in the advisor's
email, you can simply respond so and then the advisor or the colleagues can
know it and make alternative arrangements or schedule their time line before
the deadline.
The advisor's goal is to help you to make these deadlines,
produce good work, grow to be independent enough, and then graduate, find
your desirable job. Being not responsive or not effective in making
deadlines or making progress in your work can hurt yourself much more than
anyone else. That is why I told you "Do you want to make the deadline. If
not, it is totally fine to me."
That is, it is **you** who want to
make the deadlines and it is **you** who need to drive your research, not
anyone else.
Good luck on your deadline catching!
Posted at
10:50PM Jun 09, 2007
by XIE, TAO in Submission Madness |