to a beginning doctoral student that
they work on the problem. Since
you have a path in mind, it is easy to
raise questions that will lead them
where they should go, until they have
worked through to the solution on
their own. A single experience like
this is usually enough to get them
operating independently.
˲ Try getting the student to make an
early transition from reading papers to
exploring their own ideas. Certainly,
you need to read enough to get the concepts of your field, but after a point, the
more you read, the closer your mode of
thinking becomes to that of the field at
large, and “out of the box” thinking becomes harder. If they produce promising ideas, then of course a more careful
literature search must be performed.
I’ve seen enough examples to believe
that it is a rare case (although sadly not
impossible) where the student’s ideas
are completely subsumed under what
has already been done.
˲ My colleague Hector Garcia-Molina often encourages students to start
not by looking for the theoretically optimal solution, but for a simple, easily
implementable solution that gets you
90% of the way there. The optimality
might be studied later and can form an
important part of the thesis.
˲My colleague John Mitchell reminds us that even after getting past
the hurdle of believing one can invent,
the thesis can be intimidating because
of its large scale. He gets students to
focus on writing a single paper (
preferably for a conference where they will
meet people, not for a journal). After
they have written a few papers, building a thesis from them will seem much
less intimidating.
Expressing ideas. An advisor must
make sure that their students can
write clearly. There is little point training students to generate great ideas if
they cannot communicate them. It is
essential that the advisor reads very
carefully and checks every sentence of
a student’s first attempts at writing. A
common situation, and one that must
be caught early, is writing that goes
into a lot of detail on the easy parts,
and gets fuzzy or overly terse when it
comes to presenting the hard parts: the
proof of a key theorem or the details of
a complex algorithm, for example. So
an advisor must judge what is hard and
We’re trying
to get young
scientists to
the point where
they can make
independent
judgments about
what is worth
working on.
be sure that the writing does justice to
a
those parts.
Fear factor. Yet another common
job of the advisor is to teach the student to fail cheerfully and without embarrassment. Not every student has
a built-in fear of failure, but many assume it is wrong to attempt something
they doubt is possible. Often, the student’s model of a “problem” comes
from homework, where the solution is
certainly known. They are ashamed to
report “I didn’t get anything done this
week,” even if it was not for lack of effort. You don’t want students to spend
a lot of time trying to write a program
that takes another program as input
and removes all bugs (as a fellow student of mine was once advised by his
advisor to try), but it is OK to encourage a student to do something ambitious and risky, like finding more bugs
than anybody else. In these cases, a
a (Aside: While it sounds pedantic at first, you
get a huge increase in clarity by chasing the
“nonreferential this” from students’ writing.
Many students (and others) use “this” to refer
to a whole concept rather than a noun. For example: “If you turn the sproggle left, it will jam,
and the glorp will not be able to move. This is
why we foo the bar.” Now the writer of this
prose fully understands about sproggles and
glorps, so they know whether we foo the bar
because glorps do not move, or because the
sproggle jammed. It is important for students
to put themselves in the place of their readers,
who may be a little shaky on how sproggles
and glorps work, and need a more carefully
written paragraph. Today, it is not that hard to
find a “this” that is nonreferential. Almost all
begin sentences, so grepping for ‘This’ will
find them.)
vital job of the advisor is getting students to risk their time and effort, and
to deal with the case where nothing
good results.
Group therapy. A popular technique
for encouraging and engaging students
is the free lunch. Not only do Ph.D. students benefit, but it can be used to attract undergraduates into the research
community. For the past 15 years, I
have been privileged to be part of the
“Database Group” (now “Infolab”) at
Stanford, consisting of faculty Gio Wiederhold, Hector Garcia-Molina, Jennifer Widom, our students, staff, and
visitors. At regular Friday lunches, students take turns presenting informal
talks on their work, and good-natured
argument from the floor is the norm.
Students get over the fear of defending
their ideas in public, as well as benefiting from insights of others. Students
also may practice for an upcoming conference talk and receive very detailed
suggestions from fellow students. Another important function of the lunch
discussion is bonding, facilitated by a
social committee to run group events,
and by regular trip reports, which serve
as a vehicle for learning about one another’s lives.
a newer model: Project-
oriented theses
It took many years to reach this point,
but it is now fairly routine to have substantial software projects carried out
in an academic setting. While there
will always be the occasional thesis
that is purely “pencil-and-paper,” a
much more productive approach is to
introduce beginning Ph.D. students to
a project. Often they enjoy “learning by
doing,” contributing to the software
development, while learning the new
notions that are being investigated by
the project. Senior students often get
the opportunity to help, and even to supervise, junior students.
The best example I’ve seen of how to
use this mode effectively comes from
my colleague Jennifer Widom. In a series of innovative projects (
semistruc-tured data, stream databases, and now
uncertain databases), she has perfected a routine, consisting of:
1. Define a general goal for the research, and get a team of doctoral students working together.
2. Spend a substantial period of time,