Working With Your Advisor

When we first start working together, you should plan on meeting with me about every week or two weeks. We can setup a regular meeting time if you want, although it is usually better if you sign up for a meeting whenever there is something to talk about, i.e. a problem, results, ideas, etc. The meetings can be online or in-person; usually we set them up in email, but occasionally I set up a meeting sign-up schedule on the web. In the meeting we go over your recent progress, brainstorm about the next steps, and set up a plan until the next meeting.

Importantly, you should start keeping track of your ideas and progress in a research journal right away. A good way to do that is to have it on a web page that you keep expanding. It is useful for you to organize your thoughts and stay on course, and to go back to verify details. Often we will use your latest entries in the journal as the starting point for the meeting---you can also explicitly write down the meeting agenda there.

Typically we will have lots of interaction early on in your career here, at least until your proposal. Gradually you will gain more knowledge and momentum and eventually become more of an expert in your area than me. From there on I'll pretty much try to stay off your back (somewhat unsuccessfully, most of the time :-) and let you do your own work, at least when things are going well.

Last modified: Sun Sep 25 11:36:13 PDT 2022