akrish

CMU finished making acceptance decisions for the computer science department and I opted to be a student contact for a some of the admits. One of them asked me about choosing an advisor and specifically what factors he should consider in making this decision. This is a really important decision for incoming and first year graduate students that I felt it warranted adding to my previous series on graduate school.

Disclaimer: As with everything I write, this is almost entirely my opinion on this matter. It is a very important decision so I highly recommend listening to what other people have to say and talking to a lot of people about this. My experience is also very limited so any opinions should be viewed in that light.

First, choosing an advisor is a very subjective decision. It depends largely on what you are looking for and what works well for you. For example, if you are very self-motivated and independent, it may be better to have an advisor that is less hands on and vice-versa. That being said there are some factors that are more important than others, and some factors that are all-together not very important. It is often hard to evaluate an advisor along all of these axes without spending a significant amount of time working with him/her and presumably you don’t want to spend two years figuring out if an advisor is good for you. Fortunately, in many cases there are more readily observable factors that are correlated with these, and keeping in mind that there are always exceptions to the rule, the observable factors can be used to make a much faster evaluation.

Some Factors

1. Research Interest – This is the most important thing. Your advisor will most likely be funding you, so they will want you to do work that can fit under their grants. If you want to do something else because you don’t find what they want you to do to be interesting, most of them time you will have to work on that in your free time. Find an advisor who will let you work on what you want to work on. This doesn’t mean that they necessarily give you more freedom, it just means that they are interested in the things that you want to work on. An advisor’s interests is strongly correlated (kind of obviously) with the articles they have published. However, interests change, so recent papers are better indicators. Also, sometimes an advisor will fund you with a specific grant, and that grant may reflect a new direction for the advisor, so really the best way to find out what an advisor wants you to work on is to simply talk to them about what you want to work on and what they want you to work on.
2. Compatibility — It is really important that you can have productive meetings with your advisor. If you do not have a good interaction with them, your meetings will not be very productive and your research will suffer. This does not necessarily mean that they should be your friends; it means that your meetings should be productive. Being friends with your advisor is completely orthogonal; it can be good but I don’t think it is necessary. It’s hard to assess compatibility without actually interacting with the advisor so no obvious correlations here. I recommend having several meetings with a potential advisor before committing to being their student. It is also worthwhile to talk to their students and former students to not only see what they work on but also get a feel for how the professor tends to operate. More on this later.
3. Advising Style — Advisors have different ways of managing their students. Some like to be very hands on, meaning that they will work directly on your research problems with you and help you write papers. Others are much less so; they may have you work with more senior students or post-docs and they may be much more removed from your problems. Some push their students to publish early and often, others are less opinionated about publishing or even don’t let students publish as much as they want to. There are many different dimensions to advising style but there is no clear optimum. Each style has different pros and cons and it is important that you decide which aspects you care about more. For example, if you are not very self-motivated, a hands-on advisor could be good for you because they will make sure you continue to make progress on your research. On the other hand, if you are self-motivated, a hands-on advisor could be annoying, because you have to prepare things to talk to them about every week or so. If an advisor is less involved in your career, you may get sidetracked or lost, and have minimal research output. On the other hand, it gives you freedom to explore and really find problems that interest you. Anyway, I hope that you see my point; there are lots of options here but you need to think about what is right for you. Some correlated factors: age, tenure status, number of students. I’ll write a bit about these below because they can be very informative for many of the subsequent unobservable factors.
4. Availability — Most professors are pretty busy, but some are much more so than others. Some travel on a very regular basis and others generally stay on or near campus. This could affect how much time you have to meet with them. Sometimes this is a problem and sometimes this is not; it really depends on your working style. This is often correlated with age, tenure status, number of students and fame.
5. Fame — Some advisors are certainly more famous than others. This has its pros and cons. On one hand, their opinion is held in high regard so their approval of you carries a lot of weight in the community. They also typically have a lot of contacts that can be very valuable as you look for internships and jobs later on in your graduate career. On the other hand, along with fame comes increased travel and decreased availability which has direct implications for you. So while there are perks to having a famous advisor, ultimately your will work have to speak for itself. If because they cannot spend as much time with you, you don’t end up doing amazing work, the perks that they bring will be all but useless. Consequently, I think it is really more important that you find an advisor that can help you do great research rather than one that can give you these auxiliary perks. Moreover, you will also have many opportunities to find internships and network for yourself when you go to conferences, so you don’t necessarily need your advisor to help you establish connections.
6. Funding — Different schools/programs approach funding differently, so this may or may not be an issue. Typically, an advisor won’t take you on as a student unless they have funding for you. Before you get excited about working with someone, make sure that they can actually support you. In my program, you should be explicit about it. Actually, ask your potential advisor, “Can you support me financially?”

The Observable Factors:
As I mentioned above, there are a lot of factors that correlate well with the ones that are a little harder to discern. Of course you have to be careful in using these as surrogates to the ones above, but I don’t think it unreasonable to make these connections.

• Age and Tenure status — Typically age and tenure status are good indicators of advising style, availability and fame. The professors incentives can completely explain this correlation. For a younger professor (also likely a untenured professor), your research output has direct implications for them getting tenure, become famous, etc. Consequently, they are much more driven and they also usually are much more hands on. Also with being young, they may not be very well established, so they can be much more available to meet with you. It is uncommon for them to be very famous, simply because they are so young. On the other hand older professors that have tenure tend to be more hands off and less pushy about publication. However, they are usually more established so they may be less available but more famous. With age also comes experience, older advisors generally have a good feel for the direction of their research area and can also have a much broader vision about their research agenda. This means they know what the big interesting problems in their field are and can help you tackle them. It can result in you doing a very cohesive body of work with large impact.
• Number of students — An advisor with a lot of students naturally has less time to devote to any single one. So there are obvious correlations to availability. There are more subtle correlations to advising style. An advisor may choose to have fewer students so that he/she can really dive into the problems those students are working on. One with more students, on the other hand, may choose to be much more removed from their students research.

What about co-advising?
In some departments/programs, co-advising is an option that should certainly be considered. Being co-advised by one young and one old professor seems like the best of both worlds in terms of the things they have to offer. You can get the guidance/availability of a younger advisor with the broader vision and connectedness of an older advisor. I don’t have any experience with co-advisors, but I’ve been told that there are some things you need to keep in mind before jumping into this sort of situation. First, you need to make sure that your advisors get along. You may (probably will) have meetings with both of your advisors together, and you need to make sure that these meetings are productive. Second, make sure that your advisors have common interests that align with what you want to work on, or you may end up working on distinct problems for each advisor, which seems suboptimal. In this sense, negotiating a co-advising relationship can actually be quite challenging, but it can also be very rewarding if it works out.

Some parting thoughts
I’ll emphasize this again. This article is mostly my thoughts on the matter and I have just one perspective. Read what other people have to say about choosing an advisor and talk to people in your department and program. You can tell them precisely what you want and they can tailor their comments to your specific situation and even the professors you are considering. Talk to the students/former students of the advisors you are thinking about and ask them a lot of questions. Ask about their advising style, their openness to co-advising, what their graduated students have gone on to do, whether they are open to students doing internships over the summer. Any question that you can think of is probably worth asking the advisor, their students or anyone else in the department. Most students (at least in my program) are more than happy to talk to you about your decision and offer whatever advice they can so don’t feel shy. One specific question I highly recommend asking is if the advisor has had any students switch away from them and why. It is important that you don’t waste a year or two working with someone only to switch advisors later and have to (more or less) start over. You should avoid this if at all possible and understanding why people leave an advisor can definitely help you do that.

Presumably if you’ve made it this far you are actually in the middle of this process or about to begin this process. In that case, I hope you find this useful and good luck in finding an advisor and your graduate career!

This weekend, Carnegie Mellon’s Men’s ultimate team, Mr. Yuk, made the 8 hour drive out of snowy Pittsburgh to Charlotte, NC for Queen City Tune-Up. This was our first tournament since early November (Fall Easterns) and we have had very few opportunities to actually play ultimate since returning to school in January. While we haven’t had the best winter in terms of training, we did have a very productive fall season, so while my expectation was that we wouldn’t have the of best tournament, it was not unreasonable to think that we could do very well. As it turned out, my expectation was correct both results-wise and performance-wise.

Results-wise we went 3-4, with big wins against UNC, Cornell and NYU, but with upsetting losses to Ohio State and NCSU along with losses to Dartmouth and Michigan. This resulted in us taking 12th place out of 20, behind our original seeding of 10th.

Before I go on, let me just mention that the weather was a huge factor, particularly on Saturday. Reportedly winds were recorded at 20mph with gusts up to 40mph and all of our games were upwind-downwind. This had huge strategic implications for both teams, which ended up punting and playing defense on the downwind side, relying on the strong winds to help generate turns with favorable field position. Apart from Dartmouth, no team could move the disc up the field with any consistency, so upwind scores were hard to come by. Most games were consequently decided by one or two upwind scores.

Sunday was much less windy, but much colder than Saturday. The fields were frozen when we arrived and, at the start of our first game, the temperature was just about 32F. This more or less persisted throughout the day. But without the strong winds, Sunday was much more playable.

Performance-wise, we learned that we have many things to work on. Offensively, we struggled to move upwind against aggressive zone defenses. As I mentioned, part of this was because the winds were particularly strong, and most teams had difficulty doing this, but I think we can certainly improve in this area. Two specific things I think we can work on are keeping the disc off of the trap sideline and keeping the cup moving with fakes and crashes. Defensively, I think our zones need a lot of work; and I’m hopefully that this is just a product of not having practiced together in a couple of months. Our Defense-O and Offensive-D both need a fair amount of work; defensively we had many opportunities for breaks that we didn’t capitalize on and offensively we had trouble recovering the disc after a turn over.

While there are certainly many things to work on in preparation for the series, there were also some things that we did quite well. Firstly, our O-line didn’t get broken in 3 of our games on Saturday. This lead to our three wins of the tournament, all by a difference of just a couple of goals. If the offense can maintain this performance, we will be in a great position to win games in the future. Defensively, we managed to generate a lot of turnovers which is great, but as I mentioned, we had a hard time capitalizing on this. I was also pleasantly surprised with how well our D-line worked through zones, especially considering that we have a lot of people that are uncomfortable with their throws.

Here is a quick game-by-game recap:

1. UNC — UNC was the first seed in our pool, and since we had a first round bye, we got in a good warmup and were ready to play come game time. The wind had already picked up a decent amount and we traded downwind O-points for most of the game. Offensively the strategy for both teams was to immediately huck to a receiver streaking deep, and play defense in the event of a turnover. This turned out to be a successful strategy as both teams struggled to work upwind. After a fairly monotonous game, we finally managed to earn ourselves an upwind break, and the subsequent downwind break sealed the victory. CMU wins 11-8 on hard cap, our O-line did not give up a break.
2. Cornell — Coming off a huge with against UNC we were ready to bring it to Cornell. The winds picked up even more and this game proceeded much like the last one. We squeezed out a break just before half, and Cornell’s D-line could not score upwind, which resulted a positive result again for us. CMU wins 9-7 on hard cap and again our O-line did not give up a break.
3. Dartmouth — While the winds were still raging, Dartmouth did not play the hucking strategy that we had grown accustomed to in the last two games. They had solid throwers that were comfortable both up- and down-wind and they capitalized on our O-lines turnovers to earn breaks. We struggled to move the disc upwind while they continued to be successful in both directions and this lead to a fairly easy win for them. Dartmouth wins 13-4.
4. NYU — The last round of the day presented itself with a must-win situation for us if we wanted to make it to pre-quarters. Unfortunately we started out on the losing side of the coin flip, with NYU starting on offense going downwind. The game progressed as the previous ones had with both teams trading down-wind points and it looked like NYU would win in a hardcap situation, simply because they received first. However, just before half (pretty late in the game), our D-line somehow managed to get through NYU’s zone and earn a break. NYU looked about to do the same thing later but some game-saving plays helped us retain the lead and eventually earn the win. CMU wins 10-8 again on hard cap. O-line did not get broken.
5. Pre-quarters: Michigan — Michigan is a historically very strong team and their experience certainly showed in this pre-quarters matchup. While the wind wasn’t as strong as Saturday, we did not adapt our strategy and turned the disc over too easily. Meanwhile, Michigan was very conservative, repeatedly breaking our marks and working this disc up the field to earn easy scores. Michigan wins fairly easily 15-6.
6. 9th place bracket: North Carolina State — We played NCSU at Fall Easterns and beat them pretty handedly, but they were a much more prepared team this time around. Our O-line got broken several times early on and the D-line never managed to earn all of those breaks back. We went on a run later in the game but never managed to take the lead. In a disappointing loss, NCSU wins 10-8.
7. 11th place game: Ohio State — We also played and beat OSU at Fall Easterns in a fun, pretty close game but this time Ohio State’s preparation really showed. Having played two other tournaments already this spring, they were clearly more conditioned, experienced and familiar with each other than we were, and they beat us handedly. OSU wins 15-8, we end up in 12th place, 2 places behind our initial seed of 10th.

We are going back to North Carolina (this time Wilmington) in a couple of weeks for Eastern’s Qualifier. With a lot of the same teams, we certainly have the potential to make some noise, but we cannot perform as we did this passed weekend in Charlotte. Stay tuned for what I hope will be some more exciting news.

The fight against academic publishers is heating up as Tyler Neylon’s website continues to gain support against Elsevier. If you haven’t heard, the website is a place where you can publicly declare that you will boycott Elsevier, one of the academic publishers with particularly terrible practices. It may have been created in response to Timothy Gowers’ public boycott declaration, and it is supported by him and many other famous scientists and mathematicians. As of today there are 3867 total signatories, and 544 signatories in computer science alone.

First off, why is Elsevier (and most other academic publishers) so evil? In a nutshell, they exploit the work of academics (funded by taxpayers) to turn incredible profits without adding much value. Journals are run by volunteer editors (academics), papers are reviewed by volunteer reviewers (academics) and papers are written by academic researchers. Moreover, researchers are expected to prepare “camera-ready” versions of their papers, which makes the paper almost entirely ready for publication. Publishers charge exorbitant subscription fees for their journals, but their costs are minimal and their value-add is effectively non-existent.

But publishing companies effectively have a monopoly on the top journals that academics need to publish in to advance their careers. Alternative publishing venues haven’t caught on because publishing there doesn’t carry the same weight as publishing in elite journals like Nature and Science. The fact is that academia, as it pushes the boundaries of knowledge, is very conservative about accepting change. Thus, despite the fact that several alternatives have been proposed (i.e. this, this and maybe even the Arxiv along with several more abstract proposals), academia has been slow to adopt alternative venues/media for publication.

Movements like “The Cost of Knowledge” are designed to combat the inherent inertia in academia, in hopes that we can converge on a better method of publication. Once academics realize that the many of their colleagues are boycotting Elsevier/Springer/etc, it will become much more reasonable for them to boycott as well. And once the majority of a field boycotts one of these companies, either alternative publishing venues will gain credibility, or the company will be forced to change its policies/pricing/etc or risk going under.

To me, the only issue is that this movement has to involve academic institutions as a whole in addition to individual researchers. Institutions use impact factor of journals as a surrogate for research quality and use this metric in hiring and tenure decisions. Until this changes, young, untenured researchers are going to be reluctant to boycott publishing companies that run elite journals because of the career implications that boycott has. This is probably one of the primary reasons why I haven’t joined the boycott yet.

The public boycott does have some interesting side-effects. First, the fact that the boycott is public and supported by top researchers means that it is more likely to gain traction. The fact that there is a list of elite researchers who are boycotting may influence how institutions make hiring decisions, which could kick start a positive feedback loop resulting in a much more powerful boycott. A more indirect effect is that top researchers are now boycotting elite journals, meaning that the quality of those journals will decline. This might force institutions to rethink how they make hiring decisions while also enabling alternative publishing media to flourish.

Whether the boycott is successful or not, enough people are up in arms (in the blogosphere, etc.) about publishing that it finally seems that academics have enough traction to prompt some sort of change in the academic publishing system. Hopefully we’ll see some positive changes in the next couple of years.