chris martensa common pattern — and arguably failure mode — of research advising meetings is that they become essentially “status reports,” with the student trying to do everything independently between meetings, then telling their advisor what they did and their advisor giving them some kind of appraisal of that work (“good, keep going” vs “no, try something else”)
what i wish someone had told me in grad school, and what i now try to tell my students, is that you can instead view it as a “working meeting” where you (the student) get to set the agenda. have your first meeting goal be to answer the question “what are we working on today?”, not “what have you done since we last met”
jcreed@chrisamaphone I realize in retrospect that I had a lot of good frank-meetings that worked like this --- I'd say "here's what I was trying to think about about, but I got stuck" and he'd typically probe in a constructive and friendly way as to why, & help jointly figure out what to do about it...
but I agree with you that it's an important thing to make it incredibly *explicit* that this is ok. grad students don't necessarily know that a "normal/ok/acceptable meeting" can look like that.
@chrisamaphone or actually I'm trying to grasp whether this falls under the "just a status report meeting" or a "working meeting" in your analysis. Am I correct in parsing your intent in thinking that the thing that makes it a working meeting is that the feedback goes beyond "ok good vs. no this is bad" into an actual collaborative research conversation?
bc that is the thing I remember about a lot of meetings, that some of the "actual real research work" conversations took place in them
bc that is the thing I remember about a lot of meetings, that some of the "actual real research work" conversations took place in them
@jcreed no i definitely agree with you that that style of frank-meeting counts as a working meeting, and i had similar experiences — but i saw that nature of the meeting as something *he* brought to it, not something I could proactively ask for, i suppose
@jcreed which is to say, yes, you parsed my intent correctly! it was definitely an important revelation to realize that was a way that meetings/research could even work. but it took *additional* years of experience (on the other side of the advising relationship) for me to understand that the input students bring to the meeting can determine this; it’s not just some unpredictable emergent serendipitous phenomenon
@chrisamaphone ah yes good this makes a lot of sense --- I agree that I perceived it as "a thing that Frank brought to the meeting", and that, although just sort of *modeling* that working meetings as good is one thing, explicitly talking about their value is even better
@chrisamaphone or, like, as I think you're saying, helping the student to a place where they feel comfortable in that role of agenda-setting