Guide to the Advice
This guide is part of my Advice for Students.
Welcome Video
What Should You Read?
I ask my classroom students and my research advisees to read specific guides, but if neither of those applies to you or you'd like to read more than I requested, here are some possibilities:
- First-year college students and international students coming to the US will benefit from the Guide for Interacting with Faculty.
- People who want to work on research with me should read the Guide for Joining My Lab. People who become members of my lab should read the Guide for Working in HLT Lab and the Guide for Student Research.
- People writing papers will benefit from the Guide for Scholarly Writing and the Guide for Citations and References. Those who want to publish their work also should read the Guide for Research Conferences.
- People feeling pressure to overachieve, either from within themselves or from other people, should read Thoughts on Failure and Thoughts on Competition.
- People who want to become university faculty should read the Guide for the Tenure-Track Job Market in Computer/Information Sciences. My Academic Journey explains my long path to becoming a tenure-line faculty member.
- People who are getting started as university faculty should read the Guide to Professorspeak and Inglorious Proposals.
- Anyone interested in photography might want to read Thoughts on Photography.
Why I Write These Pages
There are several reasons:
- Writing down typically unwritten information about academia helps students meet expectations. Not everyone is exposed to the same preparatory information about college or graduate school. In general, I observe that students who know the basics of academia are easier to mentor toward their goals. Providing students with this information upfront allows them to focus on doing things well rather than figuring out how to do them at all.
- These pages are a tool for teaching efficiently and fairly. They make my expectations clear and predictable for students taking my courses. They save students from having to ask questions about basic information, and sometimes I point students to them for explanations of common practices.
- These pages help me to be an attentive advisor. My research advisees are my heroes and heroines: they chose to work with me, and my success depends upon them. However, my face time with each of them is limited. Giving them common guidance to read on their own lets us focus our time together on the topics that matter to them individually. I think of this approach as "flipped advising", similar to a flipped classroom.
- I like my job and I enjoy explaining it to people. Aspects of being a professor that appeal to me include the variation in activities, the intellectual stimulation, the frequent human interaction, the rapport with mentees, the friendships with colleagues, the mission of working for the public good, the travel opportunities, and the traditions and pageantry.
- The perspective of "just getting started" is interesting to me. I remember (perhaps too well) many times when I lacked basic knowledge that everyone else seemed to have. I can imagine now what I needed to hear then, and I write it down.
Sharing These Pages and Linking to Them
You're welcome to share these pages and link to them. You don't need my permission, though it's nice to hear from people who find them useful. However, you must ask for my permission before reproducing any part of my website elsewhere.
How I Use These Pages
Some are assigned reading in my courses, typically early in the semester. I ask students to read the Guide for Scholarly Writing and the Guide for Citations and References if the course contains a significant writing assignment. For courses aimed at first-year college students, I also assign the Guide for Interacting With Faculty.
I tell my research advisees to browse the guides that are specific to my lab when they join. I remind them to follow the Guide for Publishing in Conferences and Attending Them prior to starting work on their first paper submissions. While I edit their writing, I sometimes direct them toward specific relevant sections of the guides for writing and citations/references.
My website instructs students to read the Guide for Joining My Lab if they would like to work on research with me. If they send an inquiry about joining my lab that's missing key information or seems misdirected, I send them Need Help, which directs them to the same guide.
Other pages I send to students a case-by-case basis. The tenure-track job guide and Thoughts on Failure I wrote equally for my students and for the academic community.
How I Began Writing These Pages
The Guide for Joining My Lab (originally the "Advising FAQ") was the first one I wrote, in Spring 2019. I borrowed some inspiration from faculty members' statements of advising philosophy, but I also thought about what it would be like as a prospective student not to know what "advising" meant. It was a helpful frame of mind. When I posted this guide on Twitter, it received more attention than I expected, with over 1.2K likes. Soon afterward, I created the Guide for Interacting With Faculty (originally the "Teaching FAQ"). I wrote it knowing that I would make it required reading in my intro-level undergraduate classes, since it seemed like a way to save time and effort both for my students and myself.
I was glad to receive feedback from students and colleagues that those first two guides were useful beyond their intended scope, and I've written subsequent guides with broader applicability in mind. I also began adding the "thoughts" pages, for pieces that I don't think of as "guides" even if they're still guidance.
About the Pictures
The pictures seemed like a good way to add visual appeal and to increase reader engagement. I'm a photographer in my spare time, and all of them are mine.
The pictures on each page follow a specific theme. The pictorial themes are unrelated to the instructional content, although one of the themes is a pun on the content. (Finding it is an optional exercise for the reader.) Pictorial themes on a subset of other pages represent loose metaphors for their respective pages.
