I’ve never heard of Beamer before this thread, but to be fair I also haven’t worked with anyone who tried to make a LaTeX presentation for quite a while, so I’m a bit out of the loop. All I know is that the last time I did, it was way too wordy and equationy, and would have drawn criticism much like that in the OP. 
But yeah, I’m not surprised that things have improved since last I checked in. I’m still sticking with Powerpoint, though. I’ve got mad PP skills.
Email is a tough medium to give feedback on presentation materials. In the future, once you have a workable draft of your slides, I’d recommend asking him to sit down with you and just go through them together: you’ll get a lot more detailed, useful feedback then almost anyone is going to take the time to write into an email.
Yay! I’m glad things are going better with your advisor. There’s nothing like getting praise that you KNOW means you did a good job.
As Lobot said, it’s perfectly acceptable for people in my technical/business environment to expect others to communicate this way, because it’s what everyone does. Now, when I go to church, that is not the culture, and I pad my remarks with a lot more praise and fluffy nice things. And yes, expecting a different type of communication style is expecting too much of people. I would not expect my church friends to be brutally to the point (and would think it was reasonable for them to get upset if I used that sort of style), but neither would I expect effusive praise from my project manager for doing my job adequately. (Doing it superlatively is another thing entirely.)
You can express a preference for whatever you want, but do be aware that just because it’s your preference doesn’t mean that it is right (or that it is wrong, for that matter… it’s just a preference).
Well, technically speaking, “yes” is a valid answer to your rephrased question as well.
(Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I’ve been thumbing through my Douglas Hofstadter books again. :D)
You mean, you entered graduate school in mathematics without a BS in the subject, and you’ve been able to get up to speed and keep up with the other grad students, to the point where you’re in line for a Ph.D.?
Dude, you’re awesome.
Heh. I just had to share: I just got my performance review in today and I got points for being more straightforward and assertive than I had been in previous years. My boss was saying things like "Yes, I noticed that you used to be all ‘So, it was great that you were able to do that task and I really appreciate it, and now would it be possible if it’s not too much trouble for you to do this other task?’ and now you’re more like ‘Okay, I see you finished that task, thanks, here’s another one.’ "
I just thought that was interesting, given this thread… my boss said he liked it because it was much more professional.
(Mod hat off)
I’m equally impressed that we appear to have a time traveler from 1994. You didn’t have to choose a handle in leetspeak; in fact you can even have spaces now!
I should have said, “without a BS in math, physical science or engineering”, as most undergraduates in science or engineering presumably learn almost as much math as an undergraduate in math would. By contrast, the MIS programs I’ve seen tend to be less technical and more business management related; also they’re generally offered by the B-schools rather than the engineering schools.
So for you to have gotten far enough along in a graduate math program that your professor wants you to co-author papers with him is no shabby feat.
I think you might be onto something here.
You’re not. I read your threads because you say some of the same stuff that goes through my head.
Of course, it might be just you and me who think this way.
Authors don’t usually get to see the numbers, only the comments. Did none of the reviewers read the paper? Sometimes reviewers don’t get it - I’ve told the author of an accepted paper to ignore the comments of reviewer #3 because he clearly misunderstood. But if none of the reviewers got it I think the fault is in the writing, not them.
I’ve noticed in grad school generally that at first there may be an issue of misunderstood expectations. My first postgraduate degree was an MLS; and one of the first courses you take in library school is descriptive cataloging. That’s basically just the standardized description of the item–author, title, corporate emanator, pagination, and so on, which is surprisingly far from trivial and has given rise to thick volumes of cataloging rules to facilitate uniform styles of author names, physical descriptions, and so on. So my first assignments came back with depressingly low marks, and, while I have enormous respect for the value of the profession, I still couldn’t help reproaching myself, “This is library school! How can I possibly not be able to do this?”. What I didn’t comprehend at first was that the prof wanted us to not only explain the application of whatever rules we were using in the examples, but also to physically write out the resulting catalog entry.
Now I’m working on a second master’s in software engineering, which brings me to another thing I’ve noticed about graduate professors and advisors–you might first have your work handed back to you with a comment like “Seriously flawed!”, but then fixing it to the prof’s satisfaction turns out to be an almost trivial change. This exact scenario, and others like it, have happened to me.
I get polite emails from one of three sources - people wanting something from me, people saying no, and strangers. I send polite emails to those same sorts of people - like someone whose paper I’m rejecting.
Internally, emails are short and to the point. I got my PhD before email was prevalent, but I’m sure my advisor would have sent me short emails also.
Always walk a mile in the other guy’s shoes because they you are a mile away and you have a new pair of shoes.
Your adviser’s instructions seem more direct and “math like” then your version. He’s saving time and getting right to the point. You are supposed to be self motivated at this level and not need any hand holding.
Just my opinion.
Oh lord, I think I resemble that remark.
I know a birthday gift you can give your professor:
When feeling “thin-skinned” you might want to consider this excerpt from Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go in which Toshiro Kageyama describes criticism about the final game in which he won the 1966 Takamatsu-no-miya Prize:
Hey, everyone. Just an update in case anyone is interested. It turns out that my worry was for nothing–my advisor didn’t even come to my presentation! He told me that he decided to go looking around the city instead!
(That’s standard practice too right? Really. I’m asking that with no snark intended.)
Sounds like he was confident you would do a good job and didn’t think he needed to be there.
Agreed. If your advisor doesn’t bother to show for a presentation, it means he’s sure you’ll do a credible job and don’t need him to bail you out.