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A Management Problem in Science

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

A statement of the problem


This post is about a specific management problem that I often encounter while supervising students and postdocs: with the benign intention of being helpful, they start telling me what to do. This causes some interference at the very least, and often total havoc.


It requires me to give a long explanation of why this is not appropriate behavior. If I do not provide this explanation and supply an instant correction, the student begins to assume more and more that (s)he needs to take the lead in our professional relationship. This post is an attempt at crystallizing my thoughts on the topic and creating a ready reference that I can send my students/postdocs to when the occasion arises.


A specific example


Imagine I have a student (could be an undergraduate or graduate) working with me on a project. I inform him that I could be hiring a postdoc whom I might involve in that project. The student writes to me:


"I look forward to working with this new collaborator, please share my write up and contact information with him if you decide to involve him in this project."


The student means well and is actually trying to be helpful. His thought process is this: if I (the advisor) end up involving this new postdoc I’d be reaching out to him (the student) to give a heads up that I'd be sharing his work/contact information.


He is simply trying to save me this hypothetical heads up email by letting me know that he understands involving him may involve the exchange of his work and contact info. He means this only as a courtesy. Nonetheless, he is issuing me instructions.


Why is this a problem?


This is a problem, because what the student proposed is only one of a countable infinity of possibilities, all of which are dynamically, but not deterministically, changing in time .


Let me try to explain. At the moment I could be in the process of 'postdoc-hunting' , i.e. meeting/being contacted by/recruiting electronically a number of candidates. By the time I am done (maybe by early winter, maybe not) I will typically be considering 10 candidates (maybe more, maybe less).


There is typically a wide distribution in their abilities and experiences, and this will dictate partially whether and how I engage them with the student. For example, one applicant could be an absolutely brilliant mathematical physicist who has written 26 papers during her PhD with minimal guidance from her two advisors in two completely different fields, and is currently touring Europe giving talks as a grad student.


If I make her an offer (likely) and she accepts (less likely) , I might actually not tell her about the student at all (initially), because I want to see what her original thoughts on the subject are. In the process I may (or may not) uncover, using her, a totally new way of thinking about the subject, and entirely new mathematical tools. If she takes a completely different path than the one the student took I may never even introduce the two of them and just publish separate papers with them (not unusual; currently I am collaborating with three different groups separately on - different aspects of - the same topic).


Another candidate is competent, but not as brilliant as the one described above. I suspect this topic is too mathematically sophisticated for him. I might flash the student's pdf at him (without giving him a copy) and see what his response is. Likely, I would then put him on a different topic: the student might then never get to meet him (although the postdoc gets to see the student's material).


A third scenario is the one the student mentioned, but I might give that postdoc the student's contact information (for which I would ask his permission, of course) only, and leave the write-up-sharing to the two of them. 


By no means are the above three are only possibilities that can arise; I could come up with many more scenarios, but I hope I have conveyed my point. The point is that we are all part of a big machine and have to be cognizant of the existence of other parts of the machine.


The best way for the student to help me is to actually fall in line with my requests and always check if they are ending up issuing me instructions (i.e. delete those from the email). I have considerably more experience than the student/postdoc and have dynamically changing plans in my mind which they cannot guess (nobody can).


The bigger picture


It's human to empathize with others, but it is good to recognize what is best for people may not be what we think is the best for them, and in fact may be interpreted as an unwarranted intrusion into their affairs.


We may think we are being very nice presenting candy to a friend, but she may be diabetic (I did that to somebody). So the candy is actually not good for her. In fact there is a joke about this kind of situation, which states: "I am not afraid of my enemies; I am afraid of the good intentions of my friends."

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