Things you are allowed to do, academic edition
bastian.rieck.me
bastian.rieck.me
Back in 2012, I was a grad student. My advisor, for some reason, cut me loose. Most probably because he was getting a cushy administrative position elsewhere. He asked me to wrap up or leave within the semester.
I was working on x-ray fluorescence. My project was far from completion, so it was not ready to be built into a thesis. Heck, my codes were not working as they should. So, I was faced with the dilemma of either changing advisors, finishing up within 2 months, or just dropping out of the program. The first is really hard given it was end of a semester. As an international student, I had financial burdens. So, the third was really not an option. I mailed a professor at Stanford, whose papers I had read. It was a blind shot. A leap of faith. A lot depended on how and if he could extend his helping hands. I explained him my situation over email, and asked him any help that he could give at that point. He not only sent me his simulation codes, but also walked me through on how to make them run or modify them.
I could successfully make changes and design experiments based on those codes, to completion. As a mark of gratitude, I not only referenced him on subsequent papers on that topic, but also acknowledged him in my thesis and invited him for my oral defense.
I firmly believe that most academics are nice people and they're willing to help the most they can in bailing out others and alleviating their situation. I could not have crossed that milestone without the help of Dr. Guillem Pratx.
That's a really shitty thing to do. Of course he could take another job, but that's no reason to abandon you! He certainly should have kept seeing you regularly, a two-hour meeting per week doesn't kill anybody. Or if that was really not possible, at least he could have arranged to co-advise your thesis with another professor. I'm happy that it turned out good for you in the end. Did your original advisor end up signing your thesis after all?
Although I am not entirely certain, he maybe did hold a grudge. His two other students knew about the move since June, but never shared. This news was broken to me on Nov 5th, 2012. This was not about performance. I had published a journal paper in my doctoral second year, wrapping up a VR project in 2012 (in a decent journal) and was 3.8+ in grad school.
As you could imagine, it was terribly ill-timed for me. I could not transfer to another school. Good schools within the same standing all had deadlines between Dec 1 & Dec 15. GRE applications can take up to 6 weeks to be forwarded. I was dirt poor. My semester fee would have been $11,000 for Spring. I couldn't have paid it. No professor in a niche area as computational imaging, would take you at such a short notice. If I am unenrolled, I was effectively out to the starting line. By this timing, I have a feeling he set me up to fail in the end & crash out.
He did sign the thesis (that would have had been a red flag to the department). He however withdrew financial support immediately effective that day, and didn't accept to be co-author in my journal paper[1] - just me and my pair-coding partner.
There's one excellent blog I used to follow when it was active a few years ago. It has a few posts I keep sending people links to. I realised a few months ago that I had missed the last post. Turns out it was very relevant to my current job and that the author and I now work in the same niche (graphics performance for Nintendo Switch).
So I sent him a mail thanking him for the blog and saying how much I appreciate it. He replied and we had a nice back and forth.
My general rule-set is "impose as least as possible, ask something only they would know, and don't waste anyone's time."
On a given Tuesday, are famous scientists in the field super-busy?
I honestly have no guess and would believe either answer.
Writing/editing papers, grants, grant renewals, dealing with graduate students (mentoring, defenses/other events), post-docs (mentoring, job applications), meetings (with lab, department), consulting, occasional lecturing -- and that's only scratching the surface..
Not necessarily. It depends.
1) Scientific work is not linear like driving in a highway, it happens in bursts and is full of dead ends. It deals with complex problems that hadn't being solved before (or you don't know how to attack it), so there is a lot of try-miss. You can do more work in a day that in two months, specially if you work with alive organisms and must to respect its cycle life (Cetologists can't do much field work in winter for example). When I classified my first giant deep sea crustacean I lost several weeks trying in all the wrong groups, first locally and then worldwide search. After realizing my mistake and discarding all, solved it in ten minutes.
2) Researchers are often teachers also. Is not the same calling them in August than in May when they hide under a 50 cm high stack of tests and homework to review
3) Some really famous scientists, have a lot of non famous scientists doing the real work. They mostly build the team and design the experiment and then wait, check a few times and sign the result.
4) Journals take time to answer, is not uncommon to wait a couple of months to just being forced to resend the article to other journal.
It took me a while to notice this, but I gradually came to see that students who eventually succeeded in academia—finishing their Ph.D.s on time, publishing papers, getting jobs—had usually gotten involved early in the broader academic community, while many who stumbled had had trouble breaking out of the undergraduate mentality of just taking classes and studying in the library by themselves.
I have received many cold emails asking for this over the years (many more after becoming an editor for obvious reasons). Given my schedule and my research backlog, I'm unlikely to accept such an offer. What I find odd is that the requests almost always involve topics nowhere near my research expertise.
The worst ones include something like, "After going through your publication record, I see that you are an expert on this topic...". You should not expect a response. I create a new email filter to be sure I never spend time on your messages again.
Hah! That sounds like the "I came across your LinkedIn profile and was impressed by your experience" of academia. Of all the stock phrases recruiters use in their cold emails, that's got to be one of the more annoying ones. I can see why you'd block those people.
That gets fixed in the drafts/revisions. The key point is to express my problem/question in the framework which I think the senior researcher uses.
And I usually find (? 3 times out of 4?) that by the time I complete this process, I have found the answer to my question.
If not, I'll send the email. If they see you've put effort into thinking about it, they almost always respond positively.
If you're coming in from outside academia, be prepared to have useful skills/knowledge to bring to the collaboration and a clear ability to commit enough time to be valuable. Expect a much lower conversion-rate. Most people that academics encounter with cold emails (at least in physics) from the outside are insufficiently prepared or advancing a pet (usually demonstrably-incorrect) theory.
If you email the right person with,
"Hi, ISL!
I'm j7ake, and have a ton of experience with X (link to resume) and am really interested in learning more about experimental gravitational physics. I've read several of your papers [1,2,3], and your work is really interesting.
It looks like you might be able to use X to improve your results with Y -- might you have a little time to answer some questions about your group's work and see if there's a way I might be able to help you put X to good use?
Thank you!
j7ake"
you'll get replies.
I've also emailed another academic over a month ago about an article he wrote abiut a type of non-profit I'd love to set up, and haven't heard back. Though when I emailed him last year it did take 6 weeks to respond. I just wrote this to say I feel it's very hit or miss, depending on the academic in question.
If you can bring value to the relationship (sometimes interest is enough, but not always), that will make a big difference.
An HN-specific skill that might provide a mutually-beneficial "in": An ambitious experimental collaboration run by some of my physics colleagues once engaged some CS students to overhaul the collaboration's web-page. The result was one of the nicest research webpages in the (large) department.
Offering something like, "I'd really love to learn a lot more about your research -- I've built out a number of sites [1,2,3]. Could I work with you to improve your research group's page in return for helping me understand the subject-matter better as I go?" may get some replies. Make sure the relationship is mutually-beneficial and not exploitative :) (at a minimum, it can go on your resume).
I imagine there are jerks out there but honestly for a lot of people this is something they have poured a lot of themselves into (especially in academia) and its nice when someone is new but actually really interested.
I drove to the nearest university, walked into the physics department office, and asked to speak to the chair. The chair was busy, but the vice-chair was more than happy to chat for 20 minutes.
The vice-chair then took me to a researcher's office, and we chatted for half an hour. That researcher then introduced me to a group professor, who offered my an unpaid-technician job a few days a week.
After a couple months happily toiling in the lab, often alongside the PI, I was asked to change to a full-time paid position.
A year into that the PI asked me to join the graduate college. I earned a PhD from the group 6 years later.
It all worked very nicely for me, and every person was lovely and encouraging through the whole process - regardless of my audacity in asking for the chair!
I think a lot of PIs in less popular fields struggle to find computationally proficient candidates. There is a massive glut of software talent in certain hot-button domains and a huge shortage in others