This is currently work in progress. I advise you not to read it unless I told you to do so. It will be a waste of your time.
This repository contains information that might be useful for you as a new and or prospective student wanting to work with me.
This is intended to provide guidance and structure to our interaction, hoping to make it clear what we should each expect from each other. That ensures that we can enroll in a truly synergistic relation where we effectively and efficiency learn from each other.
I believe in democracy and free will. I do not tolerate racism or any kind of discrimination based on whatever moronic personal views you or others might have. If you are a racist please do not even apply to work with me. We aim to be a diverse and inclusive group.
If you want to come and work with me, after instructed to do so, you are expected to read this material. If you are working with me, I expect you know all the stuff that is in it.
I am absolutely convinced a good supervisor can be more important than a good topic for a thesis. The best topic could be become boring or even challenging with a bad supervisor. But a good supervisor could make almost any topic interesting and worthwhile. Further, a good supervisor to me might not be a good supervisor to you, and vice-versa. As in any relation, it is the interaction that is important. Regardless, I would say that talking to you future supervisor current and former students could be helpful in letting you know if you think he might be the right supervisor to you.
Therefore, please reach out to my former and or current students for advice. I do not see that as talking in my back, I see that as a smart way for you to collect information that could save us both a considerable amount of time in the future ;)
Because I work in English, in general I expect us to work in English, which is also a good training if you are hoping to develop a career in Academia. Unfortunately in Academia, in practice, we are forced to work in English. However, never forget, that comes at an extra cost, but it also comes with an advantage. If you can communicate in English, you already know two languages. Must English natives don't! So never feel inferior by not speaking or writing proper English. Chances are, you are much better on average at languages than whomever that criticizes you will be. Especially because people that know several languages are much less to be critical about that than what some unfortunately often entitled single-language UK-natives might be.
Once you become formally my student, I expect to have regular meetings with you, either about weekly, every fifteen days or once a month, depending on the project and the requirements in terms of supervision. We will define a time slot and its periodicity at the start, and then we will adapt if needs be.
After each meeting I expect you to send me (or the supervisors team) an email with the meeting minutes, describing in reasonable detail the topics covered in the meeting and in particular listing any resulting actions for yourself and for myself. That way, we always know what is expected from everyone at every point in time.
The day before each meeting I expect an email that (1) lists the previous meeting action points and (2) ticks them off if you've completed them, or (3) lists why they were not dealt with as planned, and (4) establishes an agenda for the upcoming meeting. If there were action items that were assigned to me I will reply listing how I dealt with them.
I have had very few serious issues with students before, but whenever those issues occurred, they were induced by lack of communication. Therefore, if there is something that you are not happy with, I expect you to let me know as soon as possible.
There is nothing you can say to me that will upset me more than something along the lines of "I have had these feelings for a long time but never told you".
If you talk to me about it early enough we can solve any problem together. If you come to me at a later stage, asking for a diagnostic, like Fisher once consulted after the data was collected, I might not be able to offer more than a death certificate.
These are actually books I think everyone should read before embarking on a thesis, so I also recommend them to you.
Doing a thesis is a serious business, and it is not a quick run. It's more like a marathon. Done over and over days in days out. In a wet suit. With a loaded backpack.
Therefore, you should consider before you start whether you are ready, whether you have trained enough, say, to go the distance.
Just before you embark or as you embark on a thesis, I recommend the reading of The Art of Being a Scientist, by Roel Snieder and Ken Larner. I have a copy you can borrow. Just ask me for it!
A long marathon like a thesis might seem daunting at first. I have struggled with mental health issues several times in the past, and I have come to realize this is a recurrent issue in Academia. Therefore, I also recommend you read this book: Managing your Mental Health during your PhD: A Survival Guide, by Zoë J. Ayres. I also have a copy you can borrow.
Nonetheless, doing science, to which a thesis might be a first step, is also something that for those of us who do it with passion, might be the one thing you must to do, because deep inside you feel there is nothing else you could do. In those cases, it can and it should be extremely rewarding. Therefore, I also recommend the reading of another book by Roel Snieder (and Jen Schneider), The Joy of Science. It shows you how you can do science and still find happiness, harmony and success. Again, ask me for a copy if you want to read it.
Disclaimer: Finding happiness, harmony and success as a scientist is not easy. I can't claim to have found all of these yet, and that is also why I believe all of the above books might help you.
I would recommend your thesis to be written in Latex. If you do not know what Latex is, maybe visit Overleaf where you can compile Latex documents, including hundreds of templates for thesis, reports, CVs, etc without the need to install any software.
Some possible exceptions apart, and ask me if you are an exception when in doubt, I expect you to be working from the start using R and doing reproducible research via dynamic reports in either RMarkdown or Quarto. If you do not know what these are ask me about it, but that might mean you are at a disadvantage and need to catch up on working with these.
If you need a refreshing on R you can try this tutorial
https://github.com/TiagoAMarques/AnIntro2RTutorial
and if you need an RMarkdown template this might be a useful start
https://github.com/TiagoAMarques/RMarkdownTemplate
If you do not have a reference manager, I highly recommend JABREF as it is free and deals with bibtex natively, and does much of what one might want to do managing references.
If you want integration between JABREF and Overleaf you can take a look at CiteDrive, which can make it quite convenient, but that is a non-fundamental beautification of the process that you might prefer to ignore!
I expect all my students to actively participate on a group meeting once a week, preferably in person, with online participation being possible under justifiable exceptions (e.g. if you are sick, you live far away, you are based/working in another institution, etc). These are meetings when we might discuss something about your own work, work of others, or might be dedicated to discuss some topic of interest and or to receive some visitor. Examples would include:
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a paper/topic discussion (you can, and you will be in fact expected to, suggest topics and or papers for discussion)
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a dry run on a presentation one of the students might need to do later
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a guest lecture/presentation/discussion by someone we invite to come and talk to us
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discussing about some new analysis method or tool
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a mini-lecture on some topic
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anything the students propose and is accepted by the group
The current weekly slot is Fridays at 14:00, but that might change by democratic vote.
In general you might want feedback on material of yours. When you do so, it might be helpful if:
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you tell me in advance when you might be sending me stuff for feedback to be provided, so I can allocate time to it
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it will in general be useful if you tell me when you need the feedback by, so that I can put the task into my "To do" pipeline with a date attached to it. Tasks without dates tend to be relegated to be done when I have all the tasks with dates done, which might be.... never.
If you want me to provide feedback on R code I expect to receive a script that runs, at least up to the point where it does not, if that is the case. If that is the case, and if you are sending me a .Rmd, please use option eval=FALSE on the culprit chunk so that I can compile the document regardless.
Ideally I would receive:
- a request to access a shared folder (google drive, onedrive or dropbox) where the code (and eventually all the required data / scripts) necessary to run the code at this end will be;
- ideally there will also be fully commented code or even best a dynamic report explaining the code and analysis up to the point where you need the feedback on.
Please do not include View(data) statements in dynamic reports!
I would like to receive either a shared overleaf project to comment on or a word file that I can use track changes over.