Communicating about research with faculty and colleagues
Proper communication is an important part of our professional life, not only at IIT-M, but especially so in a job, be it in an industry, academic or research institute.
Email Communication
- The first thing is to be prompt in replying to email you receive from your advisor, collaborators or other faculty in the institute.
- Sometimes, the email warrants some thought or some work to be done; it may not be possible to give a detailed reply immediately. In such cases, it is imperative to send a quick reply explaining the current status and inform when a more detailed reply can be expected.
- Emails have to be written professionally. Be careful of the spelling and grammatical errors. Ensure that you are as clear as possible in the emails. Keep the emails short and pertinent to the topic. Read Merlin Mann's piece on writing sensible email messages.
Technical Communication
- I meet my students at least once a week. For these meetings to be effective, both of us should prepare for the meeting.
- Think about what you want to discuss at these meetings. Sometimes, it might be a good idea to write down the items that need to be discussed.
- If you read an interesting paper or have an interesting idea, you are encouraged to discuss it with me. Feel free to send me the paper or background reading material (at least 24 hours in advance) so that I am better equipped for the meeting. This is your chance to give me home assignments!
- The aim of the meetings is to brainstorm various ideas and monitor the progress of the project. Preparing a two to five page technical document about the work being currently done will be useful towards both these goals.
- Take notes during the meeting; don't rely on your memory (however good it may be).
- Usually, the meetings end with a list of action items. Complete those items before the next meeting. Its a waste of time if you come to the meeting and inform me that you got stuck at some stage and were not able to complete the tasks. A better idea will be to meet me before the scheduled meeting so that these action items can be completed before the next meeting.
Handling Criticism
One of the toughest things for me when I started my graduate school was to take criticism. Here I am, having spent considerable amount of time doing what I thought was good initial work and spent a lot of time preparing presentation. During the presentation, I was stopped at nearly every other slide with questions and critique about my work and about my presentation. The slide was too wordy, the plots were too small, the work was not well thought out, am I aware of other work by so-and-so authors, why did I choose this method over a simpler method available and so on. I was immediately defensive and blocked out the learning process that comes in such discussions. Its important to realize that each criticism gives an opportunity to think differently about the problem. Especially as a student, you need to realize that the criticism is not meant to pull you down, but to point out areas of improvement.
So, defend your work, but don't be defensive.
Learn something from the critique and expand your horizons.