About: Many researchers find that their hardest struggles stem less from the technical duties of their jobs (e.g. math and coding), and more from the mental obstacles they must overcome as researchers. Here, we highlight several sources of challenges and provide a guide to overcoming them. This guide has three parts:

1. What should you expect from yourself?
2. What does your research advisor expect from you?
3. How can you be supportive of your peers?

Students from underrepresented minority groups (URM students) face additional challenges than those described here. While we hope to (very broadly) address some of these challenges here with concrete advice and a (non-exhaustive) list of resources, this is a diverse and deep topic that warrants its own guide.

1. What should you expect from yourself?

One key aspect for success as a researcher is knowing what is reasonable to expect of yourself at each stage of your development. While some of these expectations will be helpful and attainable, some will be unreasonable and may cause you unnecessary stress. In this section, we list some common (and often unreasonable) expectations incoming students might have for themselves, as well as reasonable alternatives. Since every students’ experience is different, you may relate to many of these, only some, or none at all, but we hope they will at least get you to think about what expectations you may have for yourself and whether or not they are sensible.

What you think your project is about vs. what it’s actually about

The contrast between the day-to-day of research and its broader implications: Research problems are often posed to be very specific, but they are pitched in terms of their broad implications. There can be a stark difference between the day-to-day work and the promised broader impact of the research. The day-to-day work is often more tedious and difficult, filled with lots of trial and error, dead ends and uncertainty.

As an example, a project to understand a specific type of mechanism in cancerous cells may help one day lead to a cure, but the day-to-day work involves a difficult and long process of data collection, wet-lab work, etc.

While it is good to practice pitching your project in the most impressive way possible (to prepare for future job interviews, for instance), it is good to notice how it comes across to others, and to notice how you perceive others’ projects. It is easy to feel like everyone else’s research projects are significantly more interesting than your project, and to forget that you can easily cause a peer to feel like their research is boring in comparison to your research.

Staying excited: It is unreasonable to expect your day-to-day work to be exciting in the same sort of way the broader implications are exciting. The broader implications are constructed to excite everyone – anyone can get excited about a cure for cancer, a robot that walks, etc. Excitement about the day-to-day work comes from different sources; for some it may come from a deep curiosity for the particular (and perhaps obscure) thing they are studying, for some the tasks themselves are enjoyable. Investing the time to find what excites you most about your work can help you if you ever find yourself losing momentum. All researchers find themselves unexcited about their project at times, and that is perfectly natural. The good news though, is that excitement is a skill – one can to work on! We therefore recommend that if you start noticing yourself feeling this way, talk to your advisors, collaborators, and peer and see what works for them!

Process vs. outcomes

You may look up to more experienced students and expect yourself to be just like them: you may expect yourself to present work clearly, make consistent progress on research every week, have interesting / insightful observations about others’ work at meetings, collaborate with lots of people, have a good balance between various aspects of your life, etc. Unfortunately, learning to become an effective researcher takes time; you are not expected to come in with these skills – you are expected to develop them over the course of your research career. While comparing yourself with more experienced students may help you set goals, there is also a danger in doing that: it is easy to only notice their outcomes (their research progress, insights in conversations, etc.) and forget that it took them conscious hard work over several years to get there.

In fact, if you only notice the outcomes, it may lead to an unproductive research process. Slow progress based on a methodical process can more constructively lead to publishable insights than quick attempts to jump right to an interesting result:

Example of an unproductive research process: Consider, for instance, student A, who has watched how their more experienced peers seemingly go from having no project to having a nearly complete paper with exciting results and broader implications. Student A tries to imitate: they try to go from nothing to everything in a single step. However, since such a research process rarely works, they end up getting negative results. They then find that they cannot process these negative results constructively, because they do not naturally lead to a hypothesis for why the experiment failed). Student A then feel inadequate in comparison to their peer, and does not ask for help because they feel like they would be wasting others’ time.

Example of a productive research process: In contrast, consider student B, who does not compare themselves with others, and therefore does not expect themselves to complete the whole project in one step. Instead, they follow their research advisor’s advice (and try to understand where that advice is coming from). They build a sequence of small-scale experiments, each with a clear hypothesis that can help determine the next best experiment to run. Slowly and methodically, with negative results leading constructively to new hypotheses and experiments, student B works up to a complete and publishable research project.

As a take-away, we recommend focusing more on process and skill building (learning background material, principled experimental design, communicating effectively), rather than on outcomes (e.g. getting published). The specific set of skills you have to learn depends on your research lab and advisor. For specifics, see Section 2.

Balancing research vs. classes

Balancing research with classes can be challenging. Classes often have frequent deliverables (e.g. homeworks) and can be easier to prioritize over the longer-term deliverables of research.

We compiled a list of tips we hope you find useful to help balance classes and research (as well as personal life):

• Go to office hours, and come prepared with questions after having already looked at and attempted the problems.
• Try to align class projects with research – some professors let you even combine your research with the class project.
• Pursue an independent research credit with your research advisor.
• Try making progress on your research before starting to work on class-work to make sure you don’t completely de-prioritize it.

Students from Underrepresented, Minoritized (URM) Backgrounds

If you are not a URM student, it may feel like that the image of a “good scientist” or a “good engineer” is aligned with your social, cultural and personal identities. Bt if you are a URM student, it may feel like being a “good scientist” or a “good engineer” requires you to suppress important aspects of yourself, because these concepts are often constructed in popular and academic culture in biased and exclusive terms. Furthermore, you may not see people like you represented in your lab, classrooms, and the professionals in your field, and you may be more likely to suffer from imposter phenomenon and encounter implicit bias in your career. You are not expected to deal with these challenges on your own.

We strongly encourage you to find your community. You may not find many other people in your lab or your classroom who share in your non-professional identities and interests, but they do exist! A network of mentors and allies can help you make a place in your field where you can be yourself, help you process difficult experiences, as well as help you address the specific issues you may face in the classroom, lab or generally in life. We encourage you to seek out communities based on your identity/affinity, and work out your social muscles alongside your intellectual ones.

2. What does your research advisor expect from you?

Your relationship with your advisor is a two-way street: on one hand, you are expected carry out lab duties and push your research project forward, and on the other, your advisor is expected to provide you with the feedback and support you need to become an independent researcher. Each advisor / lab will have different expectations, and it is important you communicate effectively to determine what these expectations are and how to meet these expectations, while also ensuring you are getting the help and support you need. As a rule of thumb, we recommend you to be the one to manage your relationship with your advisor – to be proactive in seeking feedback, resources, advice, etc. – and generally to err on the side of asking more questions than less. In this section, we go into more detail about several areas of conversation we recommend you to talk to your advisor about. Since each advisor / lab are unique, these may not be 100% applicable to you, but we hope that this can help get you started!

Soliciting feedback from your advisor

Some advisors give feedback regularly and some don’t, and some advisors only give feedback on certain topics and not others. As such, we recommend to periodically (every several weeks) schedule a one-on-on meeting with your advisor to solicit for feedback directly.

Some questions to ask your advisor include:

• Am I improving in the areas that I need to most?
• What skill should I focus on most in the next couple of weeks? And what is your recommendation for practicing these skills?
• How can I communicate better in group meetings?
• Are you overall happy with my performance?
• How can I be a more supportive lab-mate?

Asking for feedback will (1) help you stay focused and improve more quickly, (2) show your advisor initiative and desire to improve, and lastly, (3) it will help prevent miscommunication / never leave you uncertain about whether your advisor is happy/unhappy with you.

Communicating about communication:

Sometime it’s hard to gauge whether you’re updating your advisor too much or too little, what topics do they want to be updated on more frequently, etc. When in doubt, we encourage you to simply ask your advisor. It may seem weird/awkward at first, but from our experience, advisors appreciate straight-forward communication.

Some questions you may have include:

• How many slack messages are too many?
• If I have big-picture questions about the project before our regular meeting, should I message you about them?
• If I have technical questions about the project before our regular meeting, should we find a time to chat about those?

Asking these questions once can help put your mind at ease.

Effective communication in lab meetings

Each advisor manages their lab differently.

We compiled a list of questions we hope will be useful for you to think about in order to better tailor your communication to you advisor / group meeting style:

• What do kind of feedback do you need? (what questions do you have? where are you stuck? what is the next experiment to try?) and what do you need to tell your advisor to solicit this kind of feedback?
• What does your advisor need to hear about the project so they can help steer the project in the directions needed for their constraints (grant funding, collaboration agreements, personal interests, etc.)?
• Does your advisor remember exactly what you agreed on in the last meeting? or do they need a quick summary of the state of the project and what was agreed upon the previous meeting?
• Are there others in the meeting who do not work on your project? What kind of feedback do you need from them? What do they need from you to feel included in the conversation?
• How much time do you get to present for?

Communication can go a long way in ensuring you’re getting the support you need.

Tips for effective communication. We hope that some combination of the following tips will be useful to you, whether it be for an hour-long presentation at your lab’s group presentation, or for a quick 5-minute project update:

• Ask your advisor and peers for feedback on your presentation at the beginning of the presentation (even if its only a quick 5-min project update). Especially given time constraints, this can help you get the most out of your advisor and lab-mates.
• Summarize where you left off last meeting (ex. what hypotheses you were thinking about). Given these hypotheses, summarize what you agreed to do prior to this meeting. Lastly, give update – make sure to synthesize the high-level conclusions (don’t just brain dump a bunch of figures and facts from your experiments). Lastly, propose a set of next steps and discuss.
• Before the end of the meeting, agree on the next steps to pursue together (that way you know exactly what your advisor expects from you and you can make sure you didn’t spent a bunch of time working on something that isn’t useful). Alternatively/additionally, after the meeting you can summarize the meeting and conclusions in email/slack.
• Find an organizational method to keep track of discussion in the meetings.
• Send out slides / documents in advance so folks are given the chance to delve right in. Although it may seem like a high overhead to do for a meeting, the more you do it the quicker and more natural it will become.

Getting up to speed – the fundamental skill-set

Every lab has a fundamental skill set required to start doing research, whether it be your lab’s in-house fabrication processes / lab equipment, a theoretical basis required for your research, a way of thinking and communicating clearly, etc. Since each lab is different, we recommend asking your advisor, as well as your lab-mates some questions to get you started:

These questions include,

• What is the fundamental set of skills necessary to learn to be a productive member of lab? Which of these skills is the highest priority? and how can I learn it most effectively?
• What classes do you recommend I take that would be useful for my research / to broaden my understanding of related fields?
• Are there specific related work you recommend I read for my project? What is your strategy for reading research papers?

Independence vs. dependence

Does your advisor prefer for you to be completely independent in determining which project to pick and what experiment to try next? or do they prefer for you to work on projects they select and carry out the experiments they think are best to try next? While each advisor is different, when you’re new to research, it is more likely that your advisor will pick a project for you (or give you several options to choose from), and that most of the insights and ideas will come from them. As you continue to develop as a researcher, the balance will shift: you will become more and more independent, provide more ideas and insights, until eventually you will become more of a colleague than a student, able to propose and carry out research projects on your own.

Although each advisor is different, we recommend that if they suggest an experiment for you to try, you ask enough questions to understand why they made their suggestion, and then you try it. We make this recommendation for two reasons: (1) it is important to be respectful of your advisor’s research experience – there is a good reason why they suggested the experiment, and (2) trying out their experiment and understanding it has pedagogical value – after all, you’re here to learn how to do research from them. After you try their experiment, we further recommend you synthesize the results (i.e. don’t just present some figures – what do the results imply?), propose a next step to your advisor for feedback, and reach a mutual agreement about what to actually do next. This feedback is key to learning how to more a research project forward.

Asking for help

Knowing when to ask for help, and learning to feel comfortable asking for help are both important skills. Many students do not feel comfortable asking their advisor or their peers for help, and while it is good to try to hash out problems on your own, it is important to know when to stop and to ask for help.

Asking “good” questions: If you are nevertheless concerned your questions are not “good” and might waste someone’s time, there are a couple things you could do to help others help you, and to show initiative: (1) be as specific as possible about what you’re confused about, (2) list things you’ve already tried and why did they not work, and (3) think why what you’re observing differs from what you expected.

Advisor vs. peers – who to ask for help? In addition to knowing when and how to ask for help, it is also important to know who to ask. The actual advising you will get from your advisor vs. your peers is very lab-dependent. In some of the bigger labs, for instance, the advisor mostly helps with big-picture ideas (ex. motivation, overall direction, etc.) and feedback on writing, while peers help hash-out technical issues, on-boarding of new techniques. In smaller labs, sometimes the advisor is more involved with the technical details of each project. It’s always a good idea to ask your advisor and peers who to ask each question!

Lab logistics

Each lab / advisor are different, and it is good to know what is expected of you when it comes to lab logistics. Here we talk about logistics surrounding paper deadlines and camera-ready papers (though these are not the only lab logistics to ask about!). Specifically, we list some questions that might be worth thinking about (and directly asking your advisor) to make sure you know what’s expected of you.

Paper Deadlines:

• Which deadlines are you aiming for?
• How long before the deadline does your advisor need to see a draft?
• Does your advisor need to see the final paper submission, or do they just “ok” it when it looks reasonably close?
• What should you do if the results turn out negative? What should you do if they are positive but just barely? Do you still submit or do you wait for the next deadline?
• Does your advisor need to see the camera-ready submission? (e.g. to ensure the acknowledgements, authorship, etc. are correct before submission).

Conferences:

• Who funds travel, lodging and meals? What is the requirements and process for reimbursements?
• How many conferences will they send you for per year? and do they expect you to go to conferences at which you are not presenting?
• Does your advisor need to approve your poster?
• Does your advisor need to approve your spotlight presentation / contributed talk?
• What is the etiquette for representing your collaborators’ work?
• What is the etiquette when discussing future work with non lab-folks? (how much is appropriate to disclose?).

Communication about issues faced by URM students

If you are a URM student, you may find yourself needing to have a difficult conversation with your advisor about an issue specific to your identity/background. Perhaps you’re nervous about how to broach the topic with your advisor? Maybe you’re not sure how to ask for the support that you need? We hope that in these situations, you will be able to call on your social support network, campus-wide affinity groups, professional affinity groups, etc. – your mentors and colleagues in these communities may have had similar experiences that can help inform your approach to discussing sensitive topics with your advisor.

3. How can you be supportive of your peers?

Lead with vulnerability: Many of us have been trained to lead with our strengths – to portray ourselves in the way that makes us look most impressive so we can pass interviews, impress colleagues, etc. While leading strengths is a useful skill, it can also hinder us from building supportive research communities. When we’re surrounded by people who only lead with their strengths, it’s easy to slip into a dark mindset in which you feel like you’re not meeting your expectations for yourself, and in which everyone around you is more successful and well-balanced. And while in Section 1, we encouraged you to set reasonable expectations for yourself based on your stage of development as a researcher, here we encourage you to think about how you can help shape your peers’ self-expectations for the better. Even in the most ordinary hallway interaction – when you’re asked “how are you?” on your way to class – your response matters! We encourage you to be as honest as you feel comfortable about your experience; if you are having a bad week, tell your friend about it – don’t just answer “I’m fine, how are you?”. If everyone contributed a real vulnerability, no one has to feel like they are the only one struggling, and everyone can realize that many of their peers are facing similar difficulties. Moreover, if you lead with a real vulnerability, your friend might reciprocate and give you a chance to be supportive. We recognize that it is a privilege to be able to lead with vulnerability, and that leading with vulnerability positions some students in a difficult position, in which they may be reinforcing negative stereotypes – as such, we emphasize again the importance of finding a supportive community that creates a space in which everyone can be themselves.

Validate: When you talk to a peer who is leading with a vulnerability, although un-intuitive, it is often good to just listen and to sympathize. Offering solutions can trivialize your friends’ problems – it can make them think “if the solution is so obvious, why am I struggling? it must be because something’s wrong with me”. Asking deeper questions about their experience, how exactly they feel and why they think they feel this way can all help them better understand what they want to do. And if you’re asked for advice, then by all means say what you think!

Regularly check up on your peers: Ask your friends how they are doing and meet up with them.

Support your URM peers: While stress in school is ubiquitous, URM students experience additional challenges (e.g. stereotype threat). Recognizing and understanding these stresses that many URM students experience can help you be a better colleague, mentor, peer and friend. Be sensitive to the time/emotional burden that often falls disproportionately on URM students to advocate for themselves and educate their peers on social issues on top of their professional responsibilities as students. A good starting place is to proactively try to understand these issues through reading and reflection. Some of your peers regularly encounter unsympathetic or hateful attitudes about their identity. If you’re a bystander, speak up – it can be really difficult or scary to speak up for oneself in the moment and extremely isolating afterward if no one else intervened. Additionally, discrimination may not take the forms of words or actions with a clear target, but rather be embedded in systems and processes that can still harm your peers based on their identities. It’s important to continue reflecting on the ways we, as a community, contribute to these systemic issues.

Some readings you may find useful include:

• Mentoring Underrepresented Students in STEMM: Why Do Identities Matter? [link]
• Silent Technical Privilege [link]
• On Technical Entitlement [link]
• “Those invisible barriers are real”: The Progression of First-Generation Students Through Doctoral Education [link]
• Challenging Technical Privilege: How Race and Gender Matter [link]
• Why Are Some STEM Fields More Gender Balanced Than Others? [link]
• “I Know I Have to Work Twice as Hard and Hope That Makes Me Good Enough”: Exploring the Stress and Strain of Black Doctoral Students in Engineering and Computing [link]
• “Black Genius, Asian Fail”: The Detriment of Stereotype Lift and Stereotype Threat in High-Achieving Asian and Black STEM Students [link]
• Constructing Allyship and the Persistence of Inequality [link]
• Readings from the Weiwei Pan’s seminar on Diversity, Inclusion and Leadership in Tech

In order for us to create a supportive and welcoming community, we all need to share in the burden shouldered by every member of our community – working together to understand and address the challenges facing each of us creates a better environment for everyone.

Conclusion

Set reasonable expectations for yourself. Learning how to do research takes time – no one expects you to come in knowing everything. Set healthy and reasonable expectations for yourself based on where you are in the process.

Learn what your advisor’s expectations are. It is always a good idea to be proactive, solicit feedback about your progress, communication skills, etc., and have an open discussion with your advisor about what they expect from you.

Support your peers. Regularly check on your peers, show them that just like them, you don’t have everything figured out – if we are all open and honest about our experiences, we can, as a community, help each other set healthy and reasonable expectations for ourselves. Take the time to educate yourself on challenges faced by your peers from underrepresented minority groups.

Acknowledgements: This guide is adapted from Yaniv’s workshop, “How to make the most out of your PhD: A guide from current to incoming students”.