PhD: Bad Idea, Terrible Idea or the Very Worst of All Ideas?

[Starkess]

Good luck, DP! The whole idea of cold-emailing faculty sounds terrifying and a whole lotta NOPE. Luckily from what I have been able to deduce, this isn't considered a necessity and I safely feel that I can skip it. Now whether or not I can get up the nerve to ask professors from ~10 years ago if they will write me a LOR...

Taking my subject GRE next week. I have forgotten everything, I swear, and 2 months of self-study hasn't been quite reassuring that I will scrape by with a decent score at all. Sigh.

[Datepalm]

Good luck, Starkess! I've got the GRE next month, and studying for it is a chore.

Blu-Ray - I make sure to read a paper or two by anyone I approach, but not a lot of networking capacity beyond that. Hence this conference... plus figuring out if this is even something i want to do. （I did email one person in the US to see if she was even affiliated with the planning department and still teaching Obecause different parts of the website said different things, and got a response that she was, but had no say in admissions and i should get in touch if i get in. ）

[Raja]

3 hours ago, Starkess said:

Taking my subject GRE next week. I have forgotten everything, I swear, and 2 months of self-study hasn't been quite reassuring that I will scrape by with a decent score at all. Sigh.

 

1 hour ago, Datepalm said:

Good luck, Starkess! I've got the GRE next month, and studying for it is a chore

I'm doing mine in early November - how are you two preparing for it? I basically got a review book and I'm doing questions off and on. The math seems easy enough, but I'm a bit wary of the analytical writing section. 

[Datepalm]

I've got a book, but only because I could pick it up second-hand for a hundred rupees here (The GRE's own one, just because it was the one this guy had on a market stall.) There's a vast amount of material online, and mostly so far i've been using various apps, which is nice because I could practice questions while waiting for the bus or such (especially verbal, where theres no need for scratch paper.) I need to knuckle down and start working through the math properly though - I haven't done anything really mathy in a few years, and I need to get it to go smoothly again, all those little conversions and one-glance assessments, etc. 

The one really useful thing in the book is that they give examples and analysis of essays in the analytical writing section. It's easy to tell what makes an essay bad, a little trickier to understand what makes one really good. As far as I can tell, what distinguishes a 6 from a 4-5 is a certain fussy, boxy smugness. Hit the voice of a medium-bright but extremely self-satisfied highschool student, and you're set. Start at a slight tangent and oh-so-artfully tie it to the topic in paragraph two. One painstaikingly pointed out literary reference. At least two uses of a semi-colon. A paragraph which demonstrates that you have considered the topic from both sides. Pointificate a little. Done?

I have no idea how to study for the verbal, to be honest - my English and reading skills, as such, are as good as they're going to get for the purposes of the test. It's not like I'm running into any words I don't know or can't follow the text, but figuring out the exact brand of reductive robot-logic that they use for reading comprehension questions still throws me off now and then, that perfect score remaining just out of reach on practice tests. 

OK, back to actually studying for the damn thing instead of analyzing it. 

 

[Starkess]

I haven't really been studying for the general GRE. I have a free app on my phone called Ready4GRE that has mini lessons and sample questions, and that has been basically the extent of it. I haven't actually set a date yet for the general, tbh I'm not that worried about it, seems pretty easy. I'll probably get into a bit more once the subject GRE is over--although I may take it again in October if I fail miserably this go round, in which case I'll probably just wing the general.

For my subject GRE (physics), I've been using a focused study book, old practice tests, and copious amounts of notecards.

[Datepalm]

In continious overthinking - though is that not what academia is all about!? - my advisor at Hebrew U said I should get in touch with people i'd be interested in studying with and explicitly asking for possible short meetings at upcoming-conference-many-will-likely-attend. I am loathe to disregard her advice, but also loathe to, you know, do that. Dilemma. 

[Happy Ent]

“In Fangorn, we call this a dilemma.” He paused, smiling ruefully.

Warm laughter rumbled through the garden. The sage Ent embraced all in the radiance of his wisdom delivered on the vessel of his gentle wit, blurring comedic insight with truth.

“If you listen to your advisor’s advice, you will do something you loathe. Conceding time and effort, heartbreak, even. There is no fiercer labour than short meetings.”

He studied the Datepalm’s face, matched heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath.

“Whether you accept the advice or not, you concede trust and labour.” He paused. “But if you reject the advice…”

He could see that she was at the cusp of conclusion. Inferences moved on their own volition.

Eyes wide, brimming with tears, she stammered, nodding slowly —

“I concede the wages of my loathing as well.”

The rest was domination.

[Datepalm]

I now find Sologdin easier to understand than HE. What is happening?

Is it ok to email people, in short?

[IheartIheartTesla]

Yes you should. This is what conferences are meant for - networking. Most professors probably have their time rapidly filling up as the conference approaches, so I would suggest sending e-mails out right now. Just a short note detailing your interests, how they coincide with their interests, and then asking for a convenient time for both of you to meet.

Most conferences are structured so they have plenty of coffee breaks in between, precisely for this reason. I hate doing networking myself (even though its probably more desired in industry), but there is no reason to be shy.....the thing is, professors are also on the lookout for people to work with them, so if you take the initiative there could be payoff.

[Happy Ent]

2 hours ago, Datepalm said:

I now find Sologdin easier to understand than HE. What is happening?

The ground spun around her. What is this darkness, father?

—

When your posts are harder to understand than Sologdin’s, you have grasped the Absolute. —Dûnyain proverb 

[Datepalm]

...and that was clear, helpful straightforward communication from an academic Indian guy. My life is upside down today. 

Right, well, emailing it is.

[BLU-RAY]

Yeah, email them and meet - when I said upthread I had good responses to the cold-emailing thing, it was always when I had used that to set up a face-to-face. People are frequently willing to talk (though schedules are compressed at a conference).

[Happy Ent]

5 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Is it ok to email people, in short?

Yes. In fact, I would find such it extremely courteous and considerate of my time. (Which, at conferences, I’d otherwise use for inane chit-chat with people I don’t like very much anyway.) It’s exactly the kind of concrete, well-prepared approach that I recommend.

If I were the professor, I’d respond with a firm, very short time window, so as to avoid the situation where I pledged 25 minutes of my time with somebody who wants to convince me their new quantum sorting algorithm, has “proved” P=NP, or wants me to update some Wikipedia page about their niche interest. So “Let’s meet outside Quickbeam Hall before the Fertiliser keynote session on Thursday.” If in those 5 minutes I can ascertain that you are not a Goodkind fan, I will skip the Fertiliser keynote.

[IheartIheartTesla]

2 hours ago, Datepalm said:

...and that was clear, helpful straightforward communication from an academic Indian guy. My life is upside down today. 

Right, well, emailing it is.

If it helps, I consider myself American these days.

[TerraPrime]

On 7/6/2016 at 6:32 AM, Happy Ent said:

In particular, from the point of view of deciding on an education, the idea of “people skills” is a dangerous chimera. Nobody can teach this to you, and you can’t make an informed choice of “going to people skills school.”

This is not true. Social interactions can be taught and people can, and do, make improvements under guidance. The simple fact of writing effecting work-related email, for instance, is a teachable skill. We do it to our students all the time. We have classes in the area of business communication to teach it. Working in groups is a valuable skill for all scientists, since it's rare that you will work on a project where you're the only participant. Collaborating within and across disciplines are important assets and there are skills in communication and management that will assist in that endeavor.

[Happy Ent]

Those are good points. I stand corrected.

[Datepalm]

I'm not sure where 'people skills' blurs into 'comfortable internalization of norms and codes of a particular society' either, but it's suddenly painfully glaring when the latter is missing. I've seen graduates from a few countries in Africa really struggle to write a formal email, for example, and not through any gap of language or lack of intrinsic people skills. 

HE, I don't get it. (I will obey, but I don't get it.) An exchange of emails about a topic is a non-starter, but an exchange of emails setting up a meeting - followed by said meeting - on the exact same topic, is just lovely?

 

[Xray the Enforcer]

Almost no busy professional wants to spend more than 30 seconds on any given email exchange, because email communication is incredibly inefficient and tedious. Nobody is going to want to wade through, and respond to, paragraphs of text (which could eat up close to an hour of valuable time), from someone they've never met and have no connection to. But, as HE says, they'll be willing to give someone 5 minutes of face-time to get a sense of what you're about as a person.

[Happy Ent]

8 hours ago, Datepalm said:

HE, I don't get it. (I will obey, but I don't get it.) An exchange of emails about a topic is a non-starter, but an exchange of emails setting up a meeting - followed by said meeting - on the exact same topic, is just lovely?

What XRay said.

But let me give you a long answer. (This is a useful thread for me, because it gives the the opportunity to formulate, and inspect, things I have not made explicit to myself either.)

The meeting is fine because it shows commitment. I get a sizeable amount of email from strangers (and I’m nowhere near famous) about research. I simply can’t read that stuff. It easily takes half an hour, maybe two, to follow a research idea in an email—even if the author is brilliant at communicating. Which she isn’t. And get the right level of depth. Which she doesn’t.

So I simply will not do it. Reading turgid research ideas is something I have to to (when reviewing papers or considering research plans in a hiring committee, or when I sit in a grant committee). The best part is when a trusted colleague (former student, co-author, etc.) sends me a half-baked idea. This still all takes hours to read, but there’s a good chance for pay-off (review gets done, correct person gets hired, grant is given to promising candidate, or – Glory of Glories! – the old coauthor finally has the idea to fix Lemma 7 that we spoke about two years ago in an idea that just stalled.

This is the good stuff.

The bad stuff are the amateurs (retired chemistry teachers, or self-thaught programmers, say) who have cobbled something together. (Read https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists for a woman who answers these kinds of requests  for a living). Reading their (unprofessionally explained) research ideas is soul-destroying. Often, brilliant people. Serious. Passionate. And they have no clue about research. (Not because they’re stupid. It’s like me pitching a research idea to a chemist or an neurophysiologist. It would be laughable. But I would know. They don’t.) Not to mention the contacts I get from also appearing in the media as an expert on “soft stuff” (digital society, Google, voting, etc.) I get long letters. Some rants. Some abuse. And lots and lots of careful, long, letters with references and footnotes that would take me an hour to read and digest, and even longer to react to. Some weeks, I could easily spend 70 hours just reacting to email. Other weeks, nothing. (Now imagine what a professor at a place like Harvard has to deal with. Or Pinker. Or GRRM. Of course, those people have secretaries.)

I simply have no time for that. (I need time to react to westeros.org threads instead.)

The “research plan from Indian with an IIT degree” is somewhere between these extremes. Either this is the unpolished gem that you very much want to attract. Or she sent her exact research plan (which he bought somewhere, or copied) to 100 other institutions as well. It’s very hard to tell, but being wrong about such a student can have consequences (because she’ll go somewhere else.)

This is finally where individual commitment comes in. If the student sends me a 2-paragraph email about her research interest, mentions my own research in a nontrivial manner (“I really liked how you used the Mathesis Pin to break down the fractal structure in your recent paper with Cet’ingra. I was hoping to do something like that to another problem on Sartorial Agonics I’m considering,”) and then sets up a meeting (“I’ll be at the Metagnosis meeting in Banff in November and was wondering I could tell you about this idea. Would Tuesday be a good day for you? (I can see that you’re talking on Monday afternoon.) Best, Anasûrimbor Serwa”). 

Such a letter gives me a ton of information about you. You are real. (Note that you already knew this. Your real-ness is a triviality for you. But you need to help me believe that. You could be fake. Such substitutions have happened before. Ever are men deceived.)

[Happy Ent]

Oh, and since nobody else is saying it: My Bakker references in this thread are hilarious.