16  General Expectations

My expectations of you and your expectations of me will vary depending on your role in the lab and your prior experience and skills. You will also find that expectations change as time goes on and you gain more experience in the lab.

16.1 Mentoring

A general principle I would like to encourage and foster, is an approach whereby we all develop our mentoring skills with each other. We all have unique knowledge, experience, and skills that may well be of value to others. If we are all open to helping each other, and open to being helped by each other, that will help us do our best scientific work and will contribute to a positive, supportive, and exciting research environment.

16.2 Drive your research project

A critically important general principle is that you should take ownership of your research project. You take the steering wheel and you drive the bus. As a supervisor I may give you advice, or suggest you go in certain directions and not others (back-seat driver?) but ultimately you must take charge of the destiny of your research project, and you make the decisions about what to do next and how to do it. More generally it is up to you to take charge of your own personal journey in graduate school. This is critically important. Depending on the project, your experience, and your personal style, I may offer more or fewer suggestions/nudges, with greater or lesser assertiveness. I will do my best to respect your own research interests while at the same time doing my best to ensure that you are likely to succeed. If you do not regard your research project as your own, you will not be excited about it, and it will not be a fun time. We will work together to develop research projects that are of mutual interest to us both.

16.3 I am not your boss

I already have a job. I already have a MSc and a PhD. You are not doing your research “for me”, you are not my employee (unless of course you are a paid staff member in which case, yes you are an employee).

Note that in some labs, trainees are hired specifically to work on particular projects that appear in funded research grants. This is typically not the approach in this lab. Sure, I have a general research program in my lab that is supported by research grants that contain proposals about particular experiments… but my approach is usually that as long as the research is in the same general realm and as long as we both find it exciting and relevant, I will support it and I will support you. We will work together to specify a research project that is compatible with the ongoing work in the lab, that is likely to be of broad interest to others in the field of sensorimotor neuroscience, and that is interesting to you and to me.

16.4 Replication

Often the place to begin when you start in the lab is to replicate a previously published finding. This is a great way to familiarize yourself with the lab equipment and with the techniques we use, in the context of an experiment for which we know (usually) what the results ought to look like. Replication is by no means a waste of time. First, it’s an important scientific contribution. Second, a novel scientific question is often based on an existing paradigm, and before assessing whether a novel effect exists, it is important to verify that the paradigm itself is capable of detecting the novel effect, whatever that may be. Replication is a great way of doing this.

16.5 Reading papers

I’ve heard it said that as a researcher (whether a grad student, postdoc, or a Professor), your “job” is to read papers. As you start your MSc or your PhD you should adopt this idea as well. Your main job is to familiarize yourself with the extant scientific literature. The main way you will do this is to read voraciously. When you are starting out it will be difficult to distinguish between relevant papers and irrelevant papers. I as your supervisor will be able to help with this by guiding you towards researchers/labs/topics that we already know are highly relevant to the work that we have done in the past and are doing presently. It is impossible to know everything and nobody does. We are all limited by virtue of what we have read about. We all have blind spots. But a mature researcher will have deep knowledge of the background literature that is most relevant to their work. I’ve heard it said that at the time that you defend your PhD at your oral exam, you are the person on the planet who knows the most about your specific research topic, nobody else knows more. It is not a bad target to strive for.

Something to do immediately when you start is to choose a reference manager like Zotero or Paperpile and sign up for an account. Maintain a database of papers that you have read. We will also use shared databases for research projects/papers. Personally I use Paperpile. I will reimburse you from our research grant(s) for a Paperpile license.

16.6 Staying on track

I expect you to please come to me if you are not sure what you should be doing day to day. Let me know if you are concerned about the progress of your project. Please come to me often with data. Show me plots. Show me sample signals. Get feedback from me and others about how the project is progressing. You should look at your data often, in particular to make sure that the various signals (kinematics, forces, EMG, EEG, etc) look as they should, and to make sure that participants are performing the task as we require. The data are what this is all about.

You should expect me to make myself available to you at regular intervals to look at data, talk about your experiment, talk about papers in the literature, etc. Sometimes this could me multiple times a day, a week, and sometimes this may be once every week or two, depending on the stage of your project, and your experience in the lab. You can expect me to provide critical feedback of your research in a supportive manner. I will do my best to support your work by seeking out research grants to fund the lab. I will support your travel to conferences to present your research. You can expect me to do my best to promote a positive, supportive, collaborative research environment in the lab.

16.7 What is grad school?

Here are some excerpts from a Twitter thread by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on what research and grad school are, and are not, and how to set up the right expectations to succeed:

The hardest phase transition for PhD students, I think, is that you are supposed to be working toward competent intellectual independence. That means that your advisor doesn’t solve the problem: you do. You write your grant and fellowship proposals.

And in the case of the actual science: it’s not a problem set. There are often not step by step instructions for how to solve the problem. You are finding the instructions and implementing them and sometimes your first through fourth tries fail and it’s no one’s fault.

Of course, as in all professions, sometimes your boss [advisor] is an asshole. But sometimes it’s just hard and not because you’re being abused.

If working at the boundaries of what we know — being confused often and working hard to reduce the confusion — doesn’t sound like fun work, research may not be a fit for you, no matter how well you are being compensated.

Research is mostly the part where you are doing the work, not mostly the part where you are presenting known results. If you mostly enjoy presenting neatly packaged results, that’s a different kind of problem solving: scicomm is great and challenging and different from research.

Research requires a kind of confidence in your own logic, that you can reason your way to a solution because the solutions are a matter of reasoning. So it requires a flexible intelligence mindset: you can learn the techniques you need to know.

But no one is going to do the learning or hard work for you. Nor should they. If your advisor does too much for you, you never become competent to do things on your own. It is a difficult balancing act that is hard to get right.

One of the most important roles of faculty advisors: helping you pick the right problems; topics that are unsolved, do-able in ~3 years, will be of interest to the community and within the student’s skill set.