Advice for Graduate Students

Becoming Part of the Research Community

One of the most important things a graduate student should do is to become established as part of the research community. A good place to start is to join professionial societies or organizations in your areas(s) of interest (e.g., American Ornithologists' Union, American Society of Mammalogists, North American Benthological Society, and so on). Your advisor can also help with this process by letting you know about upcoming meetings, encouraging you to present your research findings at meetings, & introducing you to colleagues. In turn, you can make yourself more visible by attending meetings, publishing papers on your work, and meeting and maintaining contact with colleagues.

Attending Scientific Meetings

Attending meetings is valuable whether you present a paper or not. Some of the reasons to do so are:

1. You'll meet people and have a chance to discuss your ideas and to hear theirs.
2. You'll get a good sense of what the current state of research is, and will learn more about preparing posters and giving oral presentations.

If you're giving a talk or presenting a poster you'll gain even more visibility, and will have an opportunity to make an impression on other researchers.

Networking

One of the most important skills you should learn in graduate school is how to "network." Breaking into the research community requires attending meetings, meeting established researchers, and making yourself known. Networking is a learned skill, so you shouldn't expect to be an expert at it immediately; but it is also a skill that you can, and should, learn to be a successful member of the research community.

Just going to conferences and standing in the corner isn't enough. Especially if you're not normally an outgoing person, you have to make a conscious effort to meet and build relationships with other researchers. Presenting papers is a good way to do this, since people will often approach you to discuss your presentation. Introducing yourself to people whose presentations you found interesting, and asking a relevant question or describing related research you're doing, is also a good way to meet people.

You should talk about your research interests every chance you get. (But be sure to spend some time listening, too: you'll learn more this way, and people will feel that your conversations are a two-way street.) Have summaries of your work of various lengths and levels of detail mentally prepared, so that you can answer the inevitable "So what are you working on?" intelligently and clearly. If someone expresses an interest in your work, follow up! Send them e-mails concerning new ideas or asking questions; send them drafts of papers; ask them for drafts of their papers and send them comments.

Maintain the relationships you form via e-mail, and by re-establishing contact at each workshop or conference you attend. If you work at it, and use your initial acquaintances to meet new people, you'll find that your network grows rapidly.

Sometimes these contacts will grow into opportunities to do collaborative research. Seize these opportunities: you will meet more people, often become exposed to new methods of doing research or new subfields within your research area, and the responsibility you feel towards your collaborator may give you more of an incentive to stay motivated and keep accomplishing something.

Other professional activities can bring you into the research network as well: volunteer for program committees, send your resume to a book review editor, or offer to give seminars at other universities.

Doing Research

For many new graduate students, graduate school is unlike anything else they've done. Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what it is you're supposed to be learning. Yes, you have to complete a thesis, but how do you start? What should you spend your time doing?

The Daily Grind:

Being a good researcher involves more than "merely" coming up with brilliant ideas and implementing them. Most researchers spend much of their time reading papers, discussing ideas with colleagues, writing and revising papers, staring blankly into space -- and, of course, having brilliant ideas and implementing them.

Keeping a journal of your research activities and ideas may be useful. Write down speculations, interesting problems, possible solutions, random ideas, references to look up, notes on papers you've read, outlines of papers to write, and interesting quotes. Read back through it periodically. You'll notice that the bits of random thoughts start to come together and form a pattern, often turning into a research project or even a thesis topic.

You'll have to read a lot of publications to become familiar with any field, and to stay current once you've caught up. You may find yourself spending over half of your time reading, especially at the beginning. This is normal. It's also normal to be overwhelmed by the amount of reading you think you "should" do. Try to remember that it's impossible to read everything that might be relevant: instead, read selectively. When you first start reading up on a new field, ask your advisor or a fellow student what the most useful journals and conference proceedings are in your field, and ask for a list of seminal or "classic"' papers that you should definitely read. Start with these papers and the last few years of journals and proceedings.

Before bothering to read a paper, make sure it's worth it. Scan the title, then the abstract, then -- if you haven't completely lost interest already -- glance at the introduction and conclusions (of course, if your advisor tells you that this is an important paper, skip this preliminary step and jump right in!). Before you try to get all of the nitty-gritty details of the paper, skim the whole thing, and try to get a feel for the most important points. If it still seems worthwhile and relevant, go back and read the whole thing. Many people find it useful to take notes while they read. Even if you don't go back later and reread them, it helps to focus your attention and forces you to summarize as you read. And if you do need to refresh your memory later, rereading your notes is much easier and faster than reading the whole paper.

To really understand a paper, you have to understand the motivations for the problem posed, the choices made in finding a solution, the assumptions behind the solution, whether the assumptions are realistic and whether they can be removed without invalidating the approach, future directions for research, what was actually accomplished or implemented, & the validity (or lack thereof) of the theoretical justifications or empirical demonstrations.

Keep the papers you read filed away so you can find them again later, and set up an online bibliography. You may find it useful to add extra fields for keywords, the location of the paper (if you borrowed the reference from the library or a friend), and a short summary of particularly interesting papers. This bibliography will be useful for later reference, for writing your thesis, and for sharing with other graduate students.

Staying Motivated:

At times, it can be very hard to maintain a positive attitude and stay motivated. Many graduate students may suffer from insecurity, anxiety, and even boredom. First of all, realize that these are normal feelings. Try to find a sympathetic ear -- another graduate student, your advisor, or a friend outside of school. Next, try to identify why you're having trouble and identify concrete steps that you can take to improve the situation. To stay focused and motivated, it often helps to have organized activities to force you to manage your time and to do something every day. Setting up regular meetings with your advisor, attending seminars, or even extracurricular activities such as sports or music can help you to maintain a regular schedule.

Telling yourself that you ‘should' have a great topic, that you ‘should' finish in two years, that you ‘should' work 4, or 8, or 12 hours a day (or 40, or 50, or 60, or more hours a week) may not be helpful. Be realistic about what you can accomplish, and try to concentrate on giving yourself positive feedback for tasks you do complete, instead of negative feedback for those you don't.

Setting daily, weekly, and monthly goals is a good idea, and works even better if you use a "buddy system" where you and another student meet at regular intervals to review your progress. Try to find people to work with: doing research is much easier if you have someone to bounce ideas off of and to give you feedback.

The divide-and-conquer strategy works on a day-to-day level as well. Instead of writing an entire thesis, focus on the goal of writing a chapter, section, or outline. Instead of implementing a large system, break off pieces and implement one module at a time. Identify tasks that you can do in an hour or less; then you can come up with a realistic daily schedule. If you have doubts, don't let them stop you from accomplishing something -- take it one day at a time. Remember, every task you complete gets you closer to finishing.

Getting to the Thesis

The hardest part of getting a Master's degree may be writing the thesis. The process of finding a thesis topic, doing the research, and writing the thesis is different from anything most students have done before. If you have a good advisor and support network, you'll be able to get advice and help in setting directions and goals. If not, you may need to be more independent. If this is the case, don't just isolate yourself from the world: try to go out and find the resources and support you need from professors, other graduate students, mailing lists, friends, and family.

Finding an Advisor

Finding the right advisor can help you immeasurably in successfully completing a thesis. You should ideally have selected an advisor (or likely advisor) during the application process. If not, start looking around as early as possible. Of course, the ideal advisor will be in the area you're interested in working in, and will actively be doing high-quality reseach and be involved in and respected by the research community.

Check out faculty websites, read their recent publications, & go to talks they give. Talk to other graduate students and recent graduates. Ask them how their relationships with their advisors are/were, how quickly the advisor's students graduate, and how successful (well recognized, high-quality) their research is. What kinds of relationships do they have -- frequent interactions, collaborative work, encouraging independence? Handing out topics or helping students to create individual research areas, or a more hands-off style?

Other things to find out about potential advisors:

1. What is the average time their students take to finish their degrees? What is the dropout rate for their students?
2. How long have they been on the faculty? There are advantages and disadvantages to being one of a faculty member's first graduate students. On the positive side, you may have more freedom to choose your research topic and a new faculty member may have fewer responsibilities (e.g., fewer committee meetings and so on) and more time to spend interacting with students. On the negative side, your advisor won't have as much experience.

A good advisor will serve as a mentor as well as a source of technical assistance. A mentor should provide, or help you to find, the resources you need (financial, equipment, and psychological support); introduce you and promote your work to important people in your field; encourage your own interests, rather than promoting their own; be available to give you advice on the direction of your thesis and your career; and help you to find a job when you finish. They should help you to set and achieve long-term and short-term goals.

Once you identify one or more potential advisors, get to know them. Introduce yourself and describe the area you're interested in. Attend their research group meetings if they hold them regularly. Give them a copy of a research proposal if you have a good idea of what you want to work on, and ask for comments. Ask whether there are any ongoing research projects that you could get involved with. Read their published papers, and the work of their students. Drop by during office hours and ask questions.

The type of relationship that each student needs with an advisor will be different. Some students prefer to be given more direction, to have frequent contact, and to be "checked up on." Others are more independent. Some may need contact but be self-conscious about asking for it. Other things that vary include what kinds of feedback is preferred (lots of "random" ideas vs. very directed feedback (pointers)), working individually vs. in groups, working on an established research project vs. a new, independent effort; working in the same area as your advisor or doing an ``outside'' thesis.

You may find that your thesis advisor doesn't always give you all of the mentoring that you need. Multiple mentors are common and useful; they may include other faculty members in your department or elsewhere, other graduate students, or other colleagues (see the section on networking). You may want to seriously consider changing thesis advisors if your advisor is inaccessible or disinterested, gives you only negative feedback, or doesn't have the technical background to advise you on your thesis. The most important thing is to ask for what you need.

Finding a Thesis Topic

A good source of ideas for master's projects is the future work section of papers you're interested in. Try developing and implementing an extension to an existing system or technique. Generally speaking, a good thesis topic is interesting to you, to your advisor, and to the research community. As with many aspects of graduate school, the balance you find will depend at least in part on the relationship you have with your advisor. Some professors have well defined research programs and expect their students to contribute directly to this program. Others have much looser, but still related ongoing projects. Still others will take on anyone with an interesting idea, and may have a broad range of interesting ideas to offer their students. Be wary of the advisor who seems willing to let you pursue any research direction at all. You probably won't get the technical support you need, and they may lose interest in you when the next graduate student with a neat idea comes along.

If you pick a topic that you're not truly interested in simply because it's your advisor's pet area, it will be difficult to stay focused and motivated -- and you may be left hanging if your advisor moves on to a different research area before you finish. The same is true for choosing a topic because of its marketability: if you're not personally excited about the topic, you'll have a harder time finishing and a harder time convincing other people that your research is interesting. Besides, markets change more quickly than many people finish theses.

To do original research, you must be aware of ongoing research in your field. However, you'll never be able to read everything that might be relevant -- and new work is always being published.

Try to become aware and stay aware of directly related research -- but if you see new work that seems to be doing exactly what you're working on, don't panic. It's common for graduate students to see a related piece of work and think that their topic is ruined. If this happens to you, reread the paper several times to get a good understanding of what they've really been accomplished. Show the paper to your advisor or someone else who's familiar with your topic and whose opinions you respect. Introduce yourself to the author at a conference or by e-mail, and tell them about your work. By starting a dialogue, you will usually find that their work isn't quite the same, and that there are still directions open to you. You may even end up collaborating with them. Good researchers welcome the opportunity to interact and collaborate with someone who's interested in the same problems they are.

To finish quickly, it's usually best to pick a narrow, well defined topic. The downside of this approach is that it may not be as exciting to you or to the research community. If you're more of a risk-taker, choose a topic that branches out in a new direction. The danger here is that it can be difficult to carefully define the problem, and to evaluate the solution you develop. If you have a topic like this, it helps a lot to have an advisor or mentor who is good at helping you to focus and who can help you maintain a reasonably rigorous approach to the problem.

In the extreme case, if your topic is so out of the ordinary that it's unrelated to anything else, you may have difficulty convincing people it's worthwhile. Truly innovative research is, of course, exciting and often pays back in recognition from the research community -- or you could just be out in left field. If you have a far-out topic, be sure that people are actually interested in it, or you'll never be able to "sell" it later, and will probably have trouble getting your work published and finding a job. In addition, it will be hard to find colleagues who are interested in the same problems and who can give you advice and feedback.

In any case, a good topic will address important issues. You should be trying to solve a real problem, not a toy problem (or worse yet, no problem at all); you should have solid theoretical work, good empirical results or, preferably, both; and the topic will be connected to -- but not be a simple variation on or extension of -- existing research. It will also be significant yet manageable. Finding the right size problem can be difficult. One good way of identifying the right size is to read other dissertations. It's also useful to have a "telescoping organization" -- a central problem that's solvable and acceptable, with extensions and additions that are "successively riskier and that will make the thesis more exciting." If the gee-whiz additions don't pan out, you'll still have a solid result.

Remember that a thesis is only a year or two of work, and that -- if all goes well & you continue in a research-oriented field -- your research career may continue for another 30 or more. Don't be afraid to leave part of the problem for future work, and don't compare yourself to senior researchers who have years of work and publications to show for it. Graduate students often pick overly ambitious topics (although your advisor should help you identify a 'realistic' research topic).

Your proposal should provide the foundation for your thesis. First, you must circumscribe the problem and argue convincingly that it needs to be solved, and that you have a methodology for solving it. You must identify and discuss related work: has this problem been addressed before? What are the shortcomings of existing work in the area, and how will your approach differ from and be an improvement over these methods?

Present your ideas for solving the problem in as much detail as possible, and give a detailed plan of the remaining research to be done. Unless your final topic differs significantly from your proposed topic, you should be able to reuse parts of the proposal in your thesis.

Writing the Thesis

Graduate students may think that the thesis happens in two distinct phases: doing the research and writing the thesis. This may be the case for some students, but more often, these phases overlap and interact with one another. Sometimes it's difficult to formalize an idea well enough to test and prove it until you've written it up; the results of your tests often require you to make changes that mean that you have to go back and rewrite parts of the thesis; and the process of developing and testing your ideas is almost never complete (there's always more that you 'could' do) so that many graduate students end up "doing research" right up until the day or two before the thesis is turned in.

The divide-and-conquer approach works as well for writing as it does for research. A problem that many graduate students face is that their only goal seems to be "finish the thesis." It is essential that you break this down into manageable stages, both in terms of doing the research and when writing the thesis. Tasks that you can finish in a week, a day, or even as little as half an hour are much more realistic goals. Try to come up with a range of tasks, both in terms of duration and difficulty. That way, on days when you feel energetic and enthusiastic, you can sink your teeth into a solid problem, but on days when you're run-down and unmotivated, you can at least accomplish and few small tasks and get them off your queue.

Don't sit down and try to start writing the entire thesis from beginning to end. First jot down notes on what you want to cover; then organize these into an outline (which will probably change as you progress in your research and writing). Start drafting sections, beginning with those you're most confident about. Don't feel obligated to write it perfectly the first time: if you can't get a paragraph or phrase right, just write ‘something' (a rough cut, a note to yourself, a list of bulleted points) and move on. You can always come back to the hard parts later; the important thing is to make steady progress.

When writing a thesis, or any technical paper, realize that your audience is almost guaranteed to be less familiar with your subject than you are. Explain your motivations, goals, and methodology clearly. Be repetitive without being boring, by presenting your ideas at several levels of abstraction, and by using examples to convey the ideas in a different way.

Having a "writing buddy" is a good idea. If they're working on their thesis at the same time, so much the better, but the most important thing is that they be willing to give you feedback on rough drafts, meet regularly to chart your progress and give you psychological support, and preferably that they be familiar enough with your field to understand and review your writing.

Getting Feedback

To be successful at research, it is essential that you learn to cope with criticism, and even that you actively seek it out. Learn to listen to valid, constructive criticism and to ignore destructive, pointless criticism (after finding any pearls of wisdom that may be buried in it).

To get feedback, you have to present your ideas. Write up what you're working on, even if you're not ready to write a full conference or journal paper, and show it to people. Even for pre-publishable papers, write carefully and clearly, to maximize your chances of getting useful comments (and of having people read what you wrote at all).

Attend conferences and talk about your research. When you meet someone new and they ask you what you're working on, seize the opportunity -- tell them as much as they're willing to listen to. Talking to other people will help you to realize which aspects of your research are truly different and innovative, how your work fits into the current state of your field and where it's going, and which aspects of your work are harder to sell (and, therefore, which aspects you need to think more about justifying).

Giving feedback to other students and colleagues is useful for many reasons. First, it helps you to polish your critical skills, which are helpful both in understanding other people's work and in evaluating your own. Second, it helps you to build a network of people who will be your colleagues for years to come. Finally, if you give useful feedback, those people will be more likely to make an effort to do the same for you.

It will be helpful (to you and to the person whose paper you're reviewing) to organize comments on a paper in descending order of abstraction: high-level content-oriented comments, mid-level stylistic and presentation comments, and low-level nitpicky comments on syntax and grammar. Try to keep your comments constructive ("this would read better if you defined X before introducing Y") rather than destructive ("this is nonsense").

You'll want to read a paper at least twice -- once to get the basic ideas, then a second time to mark down comments. High-level comments describing your overall impression of the paper, making suggestions for organization, presentation and alternative approaches to try, potential extensions, and relevant references are generally the most useful and the hardest to give. Low-level comments are more appropriate for a paper that is being submitted for publication than for an unpublished paper such as a proposal or description of preliminary research.

Getting Financial Support for your Research

Sources of funding include grants, fellowships (e.g., from NSF), and advisors (i.e., money from a faculty member's research grant). Start looking for money early. Deadlines for applications vary, and if you miss one, you'll probably have to wait another year. After you apply, it can take six months or so to review the applications and several more months to actually start receiving money.

For a research grant or fellowship, you will have to write a proposal, so the more you've thought about potential thesis topics, the better off you'll be. You may need to tailor your proposal to the interests and needs of the particular funding agency or program you're applying to, but stick to something you know about and are sincerely interested in.