So, in other words, turn off all emotion? I guess that would make me a better statistician…
I do care what everyone thinks because that’s how people get by in academia, at least as far as I can tell. That’s what peer review is–what your peers think of your work. If they think it sucks, it sucks and doesn’t get published, no matter how much you think it deserves it. I do care what my advisor thinks because he’s basically God at this point in my life. He is the stats program (there are no other advisors). He holds the keys to that piece of paper that might, might, get me a decent teaching job at some liberal arts college where I can continue to be a lousy teacher because I praise students for what they do right.
Since both the academic world and this messageboard seem to attract a significant amount of people with Aspbergian tendencies, I wouldn’t expect a lot of social tact in this setting.
Some people also tend to be curt when communicating via email because they are slow typers or not very confident in their ability to express themselves in writing (I recall in college some of my math/science profs were the ones most prone to making spelling errors when they wrote something on the chalkboard).
I wouldn’t read a lot into it. I do think that you should try to maintain your style of things since using “the sandwich technique” does tend to be better-received by people (and, no, that doesn’t mean giving out meaningless compliments - most of the time it’s not that hard to find something nice to say about the person or their work that is actually true, even if it’s something like, “Wow, you obviously put a lot of work into this”).
Exactly. This is what I don’t like about the “sandwich” technique (I had no idea it had a name.) It comes off as a bit condescending to me. I’m not in academia, but if someone respects me, I hope they can directly give me their criticism without the need to feel to dress it up with gratuitous complimentary fluff. And if they do this “sandwich” crap, I tend to gloss over it to the meat of the criticism. Don’t tell me what’s good. Tell me what’s not, so I can improve it and get better. At least when I’m dealing with someone who gives me direct criticism, I know exactly where I stand with them. When they finally tell me “yes, it’s good” I know it must be good, not some bone they throw me to make me feel better momentarily before tearing into my work.
At any rate, I understand everyone has different approaches, and I do employ the sandwich technique myself in dealing with many people. However, the fact that your advisor is doing this, to me, says more that he respects you and thinks you’re a big boy that could handle criticism, and he is trying to efficiently and succinctly impart the information you need to get your work to a better state.
Well, notwithstanding the fact that much of civilized discourse consists of people saying things that they don’t feel deep down (e.g., “How are you today?” “Fine.” ), no, I don’t want a fluff email. There is a way to acknowledge that people have been working hard on something that nevertheless needs improvement without it coming off as all sunshine and rainbows.
And if anyone is interested in specifics, I taught a statistics class one time. No, I didn’t give out all A’s for effort. But, if the problem were to tell me the expected value of X, with X a single roll of a fair 6-sided die, I would tell a student they were on the right track if they first listed the possible values of X along with their probabilities.
Definitely. Sandwich emails are for when you need to blow sunshine up your coworker’s ass because it’s not acceptable to be strictly critical. In that context, the final quality of the work can be less important than whether you are a good person to work with and a team player.
But the relationship is totally different in academia, especially if your advisor is kind of old guard. You aren’t your advisor’s direct report, you are his apprentice. He isn’t there to manage you but to train you. These are very different and often mutually exclusive things. I think a lot of the pain people experience in their relationships with their advisors is based on these disconnected expectations.
Your Professor’s responses look just about like every busy middle managers or administrators responses I’ve ever seen. I’ve haven’t followed your history of posting like some others have, but if you are really perceiving his response as being brutally and unnecessarily curt, I have to tell you are in for world of disappointment and hurt feelings in your life.
Your notion that your peers should be handling their professional interactions with you with suggestions wrapped in buttressed politeness is … well…simply nuts. It’s just not the way business is done. The language the Professor used is a to the point professional shorthand used by most busy people everywhere in informal interaction with peers.
Where did you get this astounding sense of entitlement re how peers should address you?
I get what you’re saying. My advisor emailed me the other day and told me that a piece of my work was “ok” and I was practically shitting myself with excitement. When I start doing better than ok work, I expect he will tell me that my work is better than ok.
I occasionally need encouragement, too. I’m fortunate that I can bitch to my wife in my moments of academic despair and she pats me on the head. Equally importantly, I try to cultivate relationships with other students. My advisor got his degree in the early 70s and is one of the titans of his field: he doesn’t remember what it’s like to struggle to be minimally competent. But my colleagues do, so we try to stick together to fend off the bad feelings. My program is tiny (there are 2 other students in my cohort) so I have to make an effort to get to know people in other departments. This is not easy for me to do because of my own disposition, but I have to. Likewise I think you just need to know that you are not alone and that really, everyone else is struggling with the same shit that you are.
I guess that’s where I differ from most of the people who’ve responded thus far. I don’t see sprinkling praise into a conversation as condescending; I see it as an acknowledgment that people have emotions about the work they do and can’t just check them at the door on the way into work.
And, come to think of it, I don’t think his email was all that helpful. Since he’s the primary author on the paper, a lot of the content he wants cut is his. In fact, for all those who value harsh, specific criticism, where is it? Other than “it’s not good,” what, specifically, is wrong?
Or does asking that make me sound even more like a 13-year-old girl? I’m aiming to sound at least 15-16 here.
There are ways of saying things, some people have a better ability to do this.
Once I was working at a place and the H/R lady was giving a talk and one guy was getting on his nerves. Oh his questions were legit but she didn’t like it.
She stopped him abruptly and said “Karl, XXXCompany doesn’t exist for you. It exists to make money for its stockholders.”
The whole room went silent, and she lost total credibility with everyone after that point. She quit about two months later.
Was she wrong? No, but the point is there are ways of telling people things. And people like to think when they work they are part of a team, they’re in it together. Not that your a mindless cog working to put money in the pocket of those lucky enough to have enough to invest.
OK that is how it really is, she wasn’t wrong, but by bluntly saying no one in the entrie hotel mattered and all that counted was the money in the stockholders pockets, she did herself a HUGE amount of damage.
There are ways of saying things. And don’t confuse an education with a well rounded education. You can be brilliant in math and horrible in English.
This is certainly true. But think about it this way: when you get your dream job teaching at a liberal arts college, someday you’ll no doubt publish something or write a book. There will be no one to tell you that it’s any good. If you’re lucky you will get a lukewarm review by someone in a crappy journal who has barely read your book. If you’re really lucky, you will inspire someone to write something suitably scathing. There is simply no one out there to validate you. That will be posterity: perhaps people will realize the boldness and originality of your research after you are dead or don’t care and will cite the shit out of your paper.
The motivation has to come from within. You don’t need to check your emotions at the door. Hell, my emotions are intimately tied up in the work that I do, sometimes to an extreme degree, especially during my training. But you’ve got to forge ahead.
I suspect he wants you to think about this for yourself and show a little initiative. You’re a bright guy: after all, he accepted you as his student. You aren’t an automaton. Interpret his remarks in the context they are given and get cracking.
Oh, I don’t know, from the voluminous theory in human resources that shows that praise can be motivating? I could track down all the cites, but I’m sure you’re aware that there is a whole research stream about this.
I’m actually the same way – I tend to try to soften critique with a bit of positivity and encouragement. But the point here is that your preference doesn’t matter: your advisor is into being direct, and that’s the way he’s going to be so better to just accept that.
It sounds like you’re trying to fully reproduce your paper on the slides, which is almost always a huge mistake. Talks are about encapsulating complex work into easily digestible pieces: motivate the problem (why does the world need whatever it is you’re doing?), maybe give some background on what has been done in the past, explain your approach (highlighting along the way how it’s different/better than what other people have done), show results, and then draw conclusions.
If you want to post your slides somewhere, I’d be happy to give you more specific feeback.
I’ll probably be too busy destroying the lives of my students when I praise them for anything less than perfection to write any books.
Well, it’s off to stab in the dark some more. Of course, now I feel 10x worse because not only do I have no confidence in what I’m doing, but I’m apparently just a little less emotionally stable than a 13-year-old girl.
And again, as a result of something I’ve posted here on the Dope, I have this weird feeling that I’m completely alone in how I feel about things. If you’ve never had that feeling, it’s scary as hell. One of the scariest things I can think of is losing my mind, and yet again, I feel that’s what’s going on.
I don’t always expect people to agree with me, but it’d be nice to see a “I see where you’re coming from, but…” once in a while, from anyone, online or not.
As someone suggested, I have no right to expect anyone to put in any effort in their social dealings with me. Even though I do when I deal with others, that’s a purely personal choice that is probably harming them in the long run, by making them “soft.” I get it.
Like I said: evolutionarily speaking, I should be dead.
Where could I do that? I have a website, but it’s not secure. If it were all my own work, I’d just send it to you. But the advisor might not want it posted anywhere (he’s a little paranoid about privacy lately).
I’m a math person, and I will disagree with what most people seem to be saying – in my opinion, your description of your advisor IS a math-person thing. Technical geek types tend to be impatient with anything that’s not pertinent and to the point, which would be inefficient! (My husband, who is even math-geekier than I, and his college roommate once tried to replace usual inefficient human interchanges like “How are you?” “I’m fine.” with numbers so that it wouldn’t take up so much time. …This didn’t fly with anyone less geeky than they were, that is to say, the rest of the world.) They also don’t take criticism personally. It’s all about (or supposed to be about) the work. The nice job you would have appended is inefficient and personal and has nothing to do with what the point of his email, which is “how can my student make this better”? If you think about it, it’s actually a compliment that he expects you to be sufficiently professional about it that he doesn’t need to stroke your ego with comments like “Nice job.”
But yeah, it’s different from the way the rest of the world works. I got my lesson in this when I was doing my physics degree and was in a church meeting. A friend of my mom’s, R, was holding forth on something she thought ought to be done. I said something like “Yeah, yeah, okay, I get it.” I totally did not mean it in an offensive or insulting way, and indeed I used something like that phrase several times a week when talking to my friends about problem sets. What I meant (and what my physics friends would have heard) was “I understand, so I’m paying you the respect of saying that I get what you’re saying so that you don’t have to waste your time continuing to talk.” What she heard, of course, was “I don’t want to listen to what you’re saying.” That was really a wakeup call to me that math people do communicate in a very different style.
This doesn’t mean you need to be this way, but it does mean that if you want to stay in academia you need to be able to handle everyone else being this way.
statsman, I agree totally with giraffe. (I absolutely cringe to think of some of my early powerpoint efforts.) Without seeing your slides, of course, it’s hard to tell, but you could probably start by taking each slide and reducing to one or (at most) two basic equations, with maybe a box that says why that equation is important. Do NOT (unless absolutely necessary) reproduce a derivation on a slide. Because no one cares. If you think someone could potentially care in questions, make it a backup slide.
Also, I would say that it’s not that you are at all abnormal. It’s that you apparently are a normal social creature, whereas most math geeks are not. (I would not say that I am even close to a normal social creature, though I’ve been trying to learn the necessary skills. My husband? It is to laugh.)
Yar, when asking for input <or getting it whether you asked for it or not> the input is to improve you, not to fluff you. Don’t mistake the medium for the message; you asked for help <or didn’t> and you got it. Tada! Efficient. Anyone who’s ever done any kind of work involving people asking them for help would appreciate being able to give direct answers, have their advice taken <or not> and then everyone just moving on without becoming best friends or hearing about their new cat.
Really.
And I’m a girl, and not mathy at all.
I have had my share of questions from people who would not otherwise be talking to me, and efficiency gets everyone out of the situation with the least amount of damage, believe me.
