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How to Do Research With a Professor

by Jason Eisner (2012)

Summary

This is a bit of advice for lucky students who get to do research
with a professor.

Take this opportunity seriously. Either you make it your top
priority, or you don’t do it at all. That’s the message. Read the
rest of the page if you want to know why and how.

Why This Webpage?

I’d find it awkward to say these things directly to a nice undergrad
or master’s student I was starting to work with. It would feel like talking down to them,

whereas I like my research collaborators—however junior—to
talk with me comfortably as equals, have fun, and come up with half
the ideas.

Still, it’s important to understand up front what the pressures are
on faculty-student collaborations. So here are some things to bear
in mind.

How the Professor Sees It

[If the professor is female/male, click here.]

Your research advisor doesn’t get much credit for working with
junior students, and would find it easier and safer to work with
senior students. It’s just that someone gave him/her a chance
once: that’s how he/she ended up where he/she is today. He/She’d like
to pay that debt forward.

But should it be paid forward to you? Choosing you
represents a substantial commitment on your advisor’s part, and a
vote of confidence in you.

Time Investment

The hours that your advisor spends with you, one-on-one, are hours that
he/she no longer has available for

retaining the semblance of a plausible life (sleeping / eating / parenting / avoiding divorce)
consulting at rates of hundreds of dollars per hour
preparing for class
working on research with other students (grad or undergrad) or by himself/herself
staying current with the latest papers and techniques in the field
discharging many administrative and reviewing responsibilities

So he/she does expect that you’ll pay him/her back, by working as hard as he/she
did when he/she got his/her chance.

Research Agenda Investment

Your advisor is not only devoting time to you, but taking a risk. You
are being entrusted with part of his/her research agenda. The goal is to
make new discoveries and publish them on schedule. If you drop the
ball, then your advisor and others in the lab will miss important
publication deadlines, or will get scooped by researchers elsewhere,
or will be unable to take the next step that was depending on you.

So, don’t start doing research with the idea that it’s something
“extra” that may or may not work out. This is not an advanced course
that you can just drop or do poorly in. Unless your advisor agrees
otherwise, you are a critical player in the mission—you have a
responsibility not to let others down. Remember, someone is taking
a chance on you.

Opportunity Cost

I heard once that your boyfriend or girlfriend will ask increasingly
tough questions as your relationship ages:

“Am I getting something out of it?”
“Am I getting back as much as I’m putting in?”
“Am I getting as much as I’m worth?”

Your advisor may also ask these questions. At first, he/she’ll be happy
that he/she attracted a smart student to work on a problem that needed
working on. But he/she may sour if he/she comes to feel that he/she’s wasting his/her
time on you, or would have been wiser to assign the project to someone
else.

What Do You Get Out Of It?

You too are giving up time from your other activities (including classwork!)
to do this. So what do you get out of it?

Most important, you get research experience. This is exceptionally
important if you are considering doing a Ph.D.

The Ph.D. puts you on a track to focus on research for the next
5+ years and possibly for your whole life. Are you sure you want to
get married to research? Maybe, but try dating research first before you
commit.
Ph.D. programs are looking
for students who are already proven researchers. Grades are not
so strongly correlated with research success. The most crucial
part of your application is letters from one or more credible faculty
who can attest—with lots of supporting detail—that you
have the creativity, intelligence, enthusiasm, productivity, technical
background, and interpersonal and intrapersonal skills to do a great Ph.D.
with your future advisor.

A good friend of mine in college was taken under the wing of a
senior professor in a different department. She was a demanding
taskmaster, and my friend ended up spending much more time working in
her lab than he expected. But it changed his life. She insisted that
he apply to grad school in her field, and
she got him
accepted to a top Ph.D. program. He became a professor and is now
the chairman of a department at a highly respected school, where he
enjoys doing research with his own undergraduates.

Even if you are not considering a Ph.D., you will learn a great deal
from working closely with a professor. Often you may be working with
the world’s leading expert on a particular topic— that’s the main criterion for tenure here. (So our tenured
faculty have passed this bar at some point, and most of our untenured
faculty are successfully building a case that they will do so.)

Students don’t always realize how respected and innovative our faculty
are within their own subfields, but that’s why you chose to attend a
highly-ranked research university. Your advisor may or may not
be a great classroom teacher, but he/she has shown himself/herself to be extremely
good at working with graduate students to produce papers that advance
the field. What you’ll learn from doing that is quite different from
what you’ll learn in the classroom.

What You Can Do to Succeed

Here’s some basic advice targeted at new research students.
There are also many webpages about how to be a “good grad student,”
which should also be useful to undergrads doing research.

Time Commitment

Make plenty of room. In order to make research your
first priority, you may need to reduce your courseload or
extracurriculars. This is worth discussing with both your
academic advisor and your research advisor.
Find out what the deadlines are. For example, there may
be a target for submitting a paper to a particular conference.
When planning for deadlines, bear in mind that everything will
take twice as long as you expect—or four times as long if
you’ve never done it before. Often a paper takes roughly a year
of work for a grad student (if it includes experiments), although
they may be working on other things during that year as well.
Be honest. If you suspect that you may not have time to
do justice to the project after all, don’t string your advisor
along. Take a deep breath, apologize, and explain the situation.
Then your advisor can make an informed decision about whether to
suspend the project, give it to someone else, get a grad student
involved, etc. This is better than a slow burn of agitation on
both sides.

Time Management

Prepare for meetings. Establish a fixed time for weekly
meetings with your advisor (and perhaps with senior students).
Bring results, questions, and an agenda to your weekly meeting.
Make weekly progress. Set goalposts, and be sure you
make real progress from week to week. Use your meeting time or email
each week to make sure that you agree on what the goal for next
week is.
Take the initiative. Be somewhat
self-directed—find readings, play around with code, do
mini-experiments. But do keep your advisor posted by email.

Writing

Writing is a form of thinking, a form of memory, and a form of
communication. You should keep well-organized notes of several kinds.
It is often useful to date your entries in such files and to keep them
under version control.

“Write the paper
first.” The evolving paper is a way of organizing and
sharing your thoughts and hammering out details. New ideas
(including future plans) can go into that document, or
appendices to it.
Experimental logbook. This is a file recording the
questions you asked, the experiments you ran to answer them
(including the command-line details needed to reproduce them
perfectly), the results, and your analysis of the results.
Notes on your reading, including reading you plan to do.
This should be organized by paper and/or by topic, aimed at
helping you quickly recover the important points.
Planning. Keep some kind of to-do list and time
planning system that helps you set and discharge goals and track
your effectiveness (see the
LifeHacker website for some
options).

Working With Others

Again, be honest. Be very clear at all times about what
you do and don’t understand. Don’t fake it. It’s okay to say
you’re confused or don’t know something; you need to ask questions
to get unconfused. Also be clear about what you have and haven’t
done.
Pick a topic of mutual interest that you can handle.
This is a matter for careful discussion at the start of the
relationship.
Be explicit about what you need from your advisor. You
can take some initiative in shaping the kind of advising
relationship that will work best for you. Every advisor has a
typical advising style, which is some compromise between his/her
advising philosophy, his/her personality, your personality, and
the realities of limited time. But if you need a different kind
of guidance or a different way of organizing your relationship,
ask for it. Most advisors will appreciate the initiative and can
adapt to some extent.
Know how to ask for help. If you feel you would benefit
from closer guidance, say: “Please tell me exactly what you want
me to do by next Wednesday and I will have it done.” If you get
stuck technically, ask your advisor to help you get unstuck!
He/She can write out a more detailed plan for you, give you things
to read, ask a senior grad student to work with you, point you to
software libraries, etc. Asking the right person can be 100 times
faster than doing it yourself.

Your value to the project lies in how much you get done—it
doesn’t matter whether you invented it all yourself. This is not
homework and getting help is not cheating. Anything that is
already known in the field is fair game to reuse (with citations).
And people can also help you invent the new stuff, as long as you
acknowledge their help appropriately (possibly with
co-authorship). Getting them to help you is part of the research.
Get right as much as you can. Before you hand off a
piece of code or writing to someone else — including another
student, your advisor, or a reviewer — you ought to catch all the
problems you can catch by yourself. For a problem that you intend
to fix later, include a note to this effect. This allows the
other person to focus their limited time on spotting the problems
that were beyond your own horizon.
Be a team player. If there are other people on the
project, find out what they’re working on. Ask plenty of
questions. Get a broader sense of the project beyond your own
little corner. Help out where you can.
Share what you do. Back up your work, comment your code,
log your experiments, and be ready to hand off your code and notes
at any time. The project may live on after you. It’s not
necessary to keep private files. The best plan is to keep
everything valuable in a shared version control repository that
you, your advisor, and any other collaborators can browse and edit
at any time. (A README file in the repository can
describe the layout and list any additional resources, e.g., the
URLs of a wiki, a Google Doc, etc.) An issue tracker is also
useful. Discuss with your advisor how to set up this kind of
project infrastructure, e.g., on github.
Avoid diffusion. As a matter of etiquette, try not to
spread your work over many different local directories,
repositories, email threads, chat logs, Google documents, etc.
For example, when sending email, try to continue on an existing
thread where appropriate, rather than starting a new one. Your
advisor is juggling more email and projects than you, so will find
it helpful to keep related things together.
Keep track of what you’ve done. You may want to keep
some notes on your contributions. You can give these to your
advisor when it is time for a letter of recommendation.

But I Don’t Have a Project Yet!

Now that you’ve read this page, you understand more about how to
ask a professor about research opportunities.

When to ask (not too early). Usually you’ll need to have
taken at least a 300- or 400-level course in the appropriate
research area. If you don’t know basic concepts and terms, then it
is hard to even discuss the research problem. Don’t expect the
professor to teach you the basics in his/her office: that’s what the
course is for.

Who to ask. If you are doing extremely well in an upper-level
course, then talk to the professor about whether he/she knows of any
research opportunities in that area. It helps if the professor
already has a high opinion of you from good interactions in class
and through office hours. (You did go to office hours just to chat
about ideas, right?) Even if he/she doesn’t have anything for
you, he/she may be able to hook you up with a colleague.

How to ask. Advice from Marie desJardins: “Ask the
professor about his/her research. Professors love to talk
about their research. But don’t just sit there and nod. Listen
carefully to what he/she’s saying, think about it, and respond.”
He/She is trying to get a conversation going to assess where
you can contribute meaningfully.

To help the professor decide where to start the conversation, be
sure to show him/her your resume and your transcript. Also describe
the kinds of problems you excel at. Special skills or a remarkable
track record may give you a foot in the door. For example, although
my main research area is NLP, occasionally I do have problems that
don’t require much NLP knowledge. Rather, I’m looking for someone
who can develop a particular theorem or algorithm, or build a solid
piece of system software, or design a beautiful user interface. So
in this case, I might consider working with a great student who
hasn’t taken my NLP course.

How to ask early. If you’re not ready to start research yet,
it’s certainly still okay to ask a professor (or a senior grad
student) how you could prepare to do research in his/her
area. This might involve taking courses or MOOCs, reading a
textbook or papers, or building certain mathematical or programming
skills.

When to ask (not too late). Timing is important. Research
may not fit neatly into a semester. So approach the professor at
least a year before you graduate. This gives you a couple of
semesters plus summer and intersession. Hopefully, that’s enough
time for the professor to find an appropriate role for you and for
you to get up to speed, define the problem and approach, do some
initial work, refine the ideas, do some more work, fail, think hard,
try again, succeed, write and submit a conference paper, revise the
paper after acceptance, and present the paper at the conference.
It’s very common for a research project to take over a year even for
a grad student who is doing research full-time!

I’ll give the final word to Jorge Chan of PhD Comics:

This page online: http://cs.jhu.edu/~jason/advice/how-to-work-with-a-professor.html