Graduate Student Must-Knows
Your role has changed
As a graduate student, you are a researcher in training, not an undergrad++. From now on, your job is to learn all necessary skills for problem solving and to produce new knowledge, not just accumulating existing knowledge as what you did in your undergraduate study.
Because being a research trainee is a privilege, not a right (your tuition fee counts for little), you have some responsibilities; you, of course, also have your rights. IMHO, your primary responsibility is sincerely following instructions on how to read papers, give impressive talks, implement your brilliant ideas, and write them up to be papers and thesis. Your primary right is saying no to anything that is assigned to you but with no relevance to your research. To be fair, I can do the same thing to your requests/plans that are not relevant to your research and only for your own interests!
Contact me formally
Please make sure you send me emails/messages at least three days ahead of the expected date of processing your stuff—I’m very busy and not working on an interrupt mechanism. Also, you should be aware that you are not particularly special who I must give immediate attentions.
If contacting me by emails, please first go find some tutorials on how to write a proper email. Also, please make sure your email address is properly named—I hate email addresses with a string of strange numbers…
If contacting me by instant messaging, which I don’t like, please be aware that I may not reply. I always see instant messages as something not that important, which should otherwise be sent through emails. If this annoys you, I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to change.
Weekly meeting protocols
Before the meeting, please be well prepared: knowing what you want to discuss and presenting them with serious slides. I believe this implies that you do want to have a discussion, and this can also make our communications easy.
A 4 Ws method you may use in the meeting: (1) what was the plan we drafted last week; (2) what is the plan’s implementation progress in the last week; (3) what are the issues you ran into in the last week; and (4) what is the plan for the next week. The issues and next-week plans are the focus of our meetings. One suggestion: you can use one PPT file through all meetings so that the accumulated material can serve as a base for your thesis defense slides.
Please contact me to cancel weekly meetings if you have nothing to discuss. Again, everybody’s time is precious. See Section 2 for how to contact me.