Taking Ownership of Your Research Development

Tags: Research Skill-Building

Overview

Learning how to evaluate your progress as a research student is a crucial component of your development. Like all other skills you acquire as a researcher (e.g. reading research papers, conducting a literature search, etc.), this is a skill that is learned through deliberate practice. Here, we provide you with a guide to take ownership of your own research development by “managing up” by deliberately soliciting feedback from your research advisor and collaborators on your development. In order to do this effectively, there are two things you need to know:

  1. What skills should you work on? To help you with this, we compiled a long list of skills (see below) so that you can explicitly discuss these skills with your mentors.
  2. What are realistic expectations for yourself? Throughout the course of a single research project, you will inevitably touch on all of the skills on the list below; however, it’s too hard to focus on improving in all of them. Our recommendation here is to break this daunting task down in to bits—sit with your research mentor, and pick one skill at a time to focus on.

We hope the guide we present next will help you solicit the feedback you need from your research mentors.

Guide

Our recommendation is that you compose a document listing all of the skills in the list below. For each skill, leave room to take notes on two items:

  1. What are my strengths?
  2. What are my areas of growth?

Then, share this document with your advisor ahead of time, and meet with them 1-on-1 to fill it out together. We encourage you to repeat this process every few weeks so you can ensure you’re putting your efforts where they matter most. Lastly, before you end your meeting, come up with a list of areas of growth you want to focus on for the next few weeks by asking the following questions:

  1. Which of the areas of growth above should I focus on most in the next few weeks?
  2. What are concrete ways to improve in the above areas of growth?
  3. When would it be helpful to check in again and re-evaluate how I’m doing?

Before you begin your evaluation, we would like to dispel a few myths many students have:

  1. It is as much your advisor’s responsibility to provide you feedback as it is your responsibility to solicit feedback. As such, it is important you get in the habit of explicitly soliciting for the feedback you need to improve. This is also your chance to learn how your advisor see research student development, and will help you set more realistic expectations for yourself, and become a better mentor in the future.
  2. If your advisor brings up areas of growth, it does NOT mean you’re doing poorly—it is expected you have a lot to learn.
  3. Do not push this off until you feel certain your advisor is happy with your progress. Many students have tendencies to “read tea leaves” (i.e. guess from facial expressions, messages, etc.) when trying to determine if our advisor is happy with us, instead of asking explicitly. You may find that even at times you aren’t certain your advisor is happy with you, they actually are.

List of Research Skills to Practice

Teamwork and interdependence:

  • Asking for and receiving feedback about what you need to make progress on research, and to develop your research skills
  • Asking for and receiving help: gaining comfort asking for help; knowing who in your lab is best to ask what type of quetsion
  • Turning a general feeling of confusion into concrete questions
  • Effectively supporting other lab members: understanding how background and identity shapes each person’s experience of research and academic culture
  • Setting expectations for internal and external collaborations (authorship, workflow, roles, etc.)
  • Avoiding and resolving potential conflicts during collaborations
  • Working effectively with more senior folks or folks more experience/skilled in some area you’re working in
  • Giving constructive feedback
  • Mentoring more junior researchers/students

Presentation and communication of research:

  • Communicating research updates during 10min, 20min, 30min meetings
  • Communicating your research as a 1min elevator pitch
  • Effectively asking for technical feedback during research meetings
  • Listening to technical talks and asking questions during/after
  • Effectively communicating your own research (presentations/writing/panels) to different audiences (in your lab, in your field, in interdisciplinary contexts, with general audiences)
  • Writing and speaking in a mathematically/technically precise fashion

Task progress and completion:

  • Time management; balancing coursework with research, classes, etc; asking for help when needed
  • Setting achievable short and long-term goals/deadlines in advance
  • Checking in/reporting progress toward established deadlines
  • Switching between different projects / managing time across different projects

Progress toward independent research, initiative, and creativity:

  • Learning background/foundational knowledge
  • Reading and evaluating research literature with respect to your own research goals
  • Evaluating the novelty of a technical contribution in relation to a body of literature
  • Critically evaluating research proposals/questions
  • Pivoting research directions when reaching (what seems like) a dead end
  • Forming new hypotheses from “negative” / unexpected results
  • Debugging code and research ideas
  • Formalizing vague questions into concrete solvable problem statements
  • Finding relevant resources online (e.g. identifying relevant keywords, skimming paper for relevance)
  • Designing synthetic/toy data-sets/experiments to test hypotheses in a controlled environment
  • Synthesizing results from multiple experiments
  • Proposing small project ideas (extending existing work)
  • Proposing big project ideas (asking more big picture/philosophical questions) that can be broken down into several small project ideas
  • Decomposing a big research program into concrete questions for students you mentor

Professional development:

  • Networking at conferences
  • Visiting other labs
  • Writing research statements, personal statements, grant proposals
  • Giving presentations at other labs/seminars/conferences
  • Participating in department or national meetings
  • Etiquette for sharing unpublished research ideas
  • Understanding the landscape of possible job opportunities outside of traditional academia/industry

Managing yourself:

  • Managing work-life balance
  • Managing stress from not having a strong identity as a researcher or having that identity challenged
  • Managing stress from uncertainty about one’s progress
  • Realistically evaluating your growth/progress
  • Motivating yourself to work
  • Setting reasonable goals for yourself

Research in context:

  • Understanding your research and your field in the broader historical, cultural, political, and social contexts
  • Evaluating the broader impact of your research; identifying relevant socio-technical systems and stakeholders
  • Understanding how power dynamics (e.g. funding structures, individuals in power, etc.) shape research questions that are valued in your field
  • Understanding who does academic culture exclude and undervalue?
  • Understanding who does academic culture award credit/recognition to?
  • Finding ways to meaningfully engage with all of the above questions in order to build a better, inclusive academic culture that can support rigorous, inclusive and useful science

Acknowledgements: This guide is adapted from Yaniv’s offering of CS290 at Harvard and an document created by Weiwei Pan.