Weekly Research Progress Meetings: How to do it right if you want to do it right?
First thing first. India’s team won the T20 cricket World Cup. I ended my previous blog [1] with the hope that with all the 3S, India would win the next ICC trophy and it happened. Yippee. We got some medals at the Olympics too, but no gold yet :(
Returning to the blog title, research progress meeting with your advisor. Huh, this is a very subtle topic for both the advisor and the mentees. What is the deal? As always, let’s assume the mentee is Gollu. Research is all about communication and more importantly effective/precise communication. Weekly/bi-weekly meetings are the sync points for you and your advisor. Your advisor is a collaborator who wants to learn with you and contribute to what he/she can to ensure you progress slowly but steadily in your research goals. If these meetings are done right, it is a win-win situation for you and your advisor, and if not done properly, both lose their respective precious time and bandwidth, leading to no progress, frustration, and friction.
But why weekly/bi-weekly meetings? What if Gollu is an awesome student who knows almost everything needed for his/her thesis? In that case, Gollu should submit his/her thesis work once done and then meet with his/her advisor :) Jokes apart, even awesome students struggle in research. The only exception for not meeting your advisor is that you have been doing awesome research, have already gone through the bumpy ride, and know how to navigate your research path independently. However, that comes with experience; usually, senior PhDs and postdocs can do that independently.
So, let’s ask again, why weekly meetings? good research demands good conversations. The more you discuss, the more you can see where you are, where you want to go, and how to go there if there is a way, or there is no way. In summary, discussions/dialogue help make the research problem statement, precise. So, the student and the advisor should ask the right questions every week, for weeks, months, and years. However, all these make sense if both parties agree on doing good research and not mediocre research [1]. Weekly meetings make sure that your advisor knows that you are on path p and you know that your advisor expects you to be on path p. Basically, you both are helping each other to reach the common goal.
What else? Weekly meetings are checkpoints for the bigger goal: UG/masters/PhD thesis. A PhD thesis is a culmination of 100s of weekly meeting updates stitched together. Really? Well, let’s take a five-year PhD. Let’s divide it into five one-year checkpoints (this is what most of the departments will do, to make sure students like Gollu make progress and he/she is on track). However, Gollu can’t show/defend his progress by working on his/her thesis a few weeks before these yearly progress checkpoints. So, let’s break the yearly progress into 30 to 40 weekly meetings per year. Now the job is simple, just take care of one week at a time, weeks will take care of years and years will take care of the long PhD journey. The same goes for a master’s thesis. Here yearly checkpoints are replaced by bi-annual progress meetings scheduled by the department.
What else? Weekly meetings are also a great way to discuss skills that you have developed or would like to develop as a student researcher. As a student researcher, working on computer systems, Gollu needs to know how to read papers critically, how to perform experiments ethically and efficiently, how to summarize experiments, and how to summarize findings through writeups and presentations with clarity. How not to procrastinate. How to respect deadlines. These skills can also be discussed during weekly meetings. OK, let’s get started then.
As a student researcher, Gollu aspires to do high-quality research and see himself/herself presenting at a flagship conference. Keeping this goal in mind, the figure above shows the importance of weekly meetings, keeping all the hiccups and uncertainties in mind. The root of the tree is THE GOAL you want to achieve. Say I want to design a secure memory hierarchy. You break that problem into sub-problems and sub-tasks, creating multiple branches. Where are the weekly meetings? the leaves of the tree. You take care of one leaf at a time, which will take care of one branch at a time, and finally, you will reach the root of the tree. It is perfectly fine to fail, fail for weeks, and close to zero progress are also common, however, to know that you are indeed not progressing you need a weekly meeting/conversation/checkpoint.
It may happen that Gollu spent a year on one branch of the tree only to realize that it is not that useful. Well, I would still say Gollu is on the right path. My definition of the wrong path is when you keep on digressing from the task/sub-task at hand, which will eventually make the journey toward the root difficult and after a certain point of time impossible.
Getting frustrated in your research journey is completely fine. The key is to hang in there in your leaf node or the branch that you are in. Take a hard break, detach yourself from the research world for a few days, or weeks, and come back and start where you left off.
On-demand meetings: Once you get the maturity and have all the skills required for good research then you may not want to meet your advisor every week. Instead, you would like to meet with your advisor once you have some significant progress to show. This works well with self-motivated students who already have a publication and know how to navigate the path on their own with little or no support from an advisor. Ideally, an advisor would like to see his/her students enter that stage sooner than later.
Group meetings: Apart from weekly meetings, group meetings where all the group members talk about their research progress bi-weekly/monthly also help the individual and the group. It also provides a platform for collaboration among the group members.
OK. Now that we have established the importance of weekly/group meetings, let’s see how to do it. Here are some of the tips that may work for you.
I. Have a single slide for the complete research work, with the recent week’s work/progress at the top. For each week, have an agenda that should continue from the minutes of the previous meeting so that you and your advisor can sync up easily.
II. Start with the tasks/todos that you and your advisor discussed during last week’s meeting.
III. If you have coded some and you want your advisor to check the implementation: then Github link should be there. Similarly, if you have tons of data from experiments to show, better to put it on a Google sheet, collate it, and summarize it with legible plots. The same goes for writing. Make sure all the links have direct access to your advisor with edit permission. It is a common practice to write after all is done. However, a better approach is you write while you do research, which helps both you and your advisor and more importantly your research (Slide 5 [2]). Remember the goal, the goal is to communicate your research to the rest of the world. “Communication” is the key. The sooner you learn these skills, the better for you and your advisor.
IV. Let’s say the meeting with your advisor is scheduled for the day d. Then it is a good practice to decide what you want to discuss, show, and ask by day d-2. Spend a day looking at all the data, questions, plots, ideas, etc that you want to discuss. Send an email with the agenda a day before with your advisor. Why? It is not important to showcase to your advisor that you have done a lot. That is anyways expected even from an intern who has no clue about research. For an MS/Mtech/PhD student, It is important to have a detailed/comprehensive discussion on the small things that you have done. Remember your advisor is a collaborator. So your adviser is also curious to know all the findings but to make it meaningful you need to make sure your meeting agenda/slides are well thought out and not some random data generated a few hours before the meeting that you have no clue about. In summary, better to avoid finishing things at the last minute with you having no clue about what you have done. Also, it is your research. Your advisor is just there to advise. However, you need to help your advisor to provide advice. So, you should spend time thinking about your weekly progress before you communicate it to your advisor.
IV. If you do not have any updates to share, still meet with your advisor saying there are no updates. Maybe talk about the books/blogs that you have read, interesting videos that you went through etc etc. But still, meet and re-sync with your goal for the next week.
V. Finally, on top of weekly/bi-weekly meetings, random meetings during lab hours also help, daily. A five-minute chit-chat over tea/coffee also helps both the advisor and the student. For that student has to come to the lab :)
VI. The other side: It is common for students to get trapped in their definition of progress which eventually leads to mediocre research or no research. Your advisor may not push/motivate you after a while if he/she sees resistance from your side. An advisor can only help when the student indeed needs it.
As they say time flies. A five-year PhD program allows you to develop five different skills in five years with a good set of publications. Same for MS where the five-year becomes 2.5 years. So, no progress for years will create friction between Gollu and his/her advisor, and the research progress committee. Please note that it is just impossible to get all the skills in a few months and get publications at top forums in a few months. It takes years. PERIOD. Yes, mediocre research can be done in a few hours but the goal of this blog is different. As said at the beginning of the blog, treat your MS/Mtech/PhD thesis as a collection of weekly meetings. Ideally, on average, weekly meetings should help to freeze 0.5 pages of your thesis. Two pages per month for five years will lead to a rock-solid 120-page (60-page) PhD(MS) thesis.
Disclaimer: The above points will help (I hope it will) many. However, many students may not agree with this blog and it is perfectly fine. As long as you and your advisor know a way that works for you and your research progress then all good. The problem comes when you know the magical way that your advisor does not know or your advisor knows a magical way that you are not aware of. Make sure you and your advisor both know the magical powers and please share your successful stories I will update this blog in the future.
Thanks to some of my students who showed me how to get the weekly/bi-weekly meetings done in an effective way, which ensures slow but steady progress. Special thanks to Sweta, Prathamesh, Naman, and Giriraj.
