12 Jan 2012
•
Academia
I encounter a surprising number of academics who can’t be bothered to respond to direct, concise questions about their published research.
I do understand that busy researchers receive a lot of email and don’t have all the time in the world to respond to every query.
That said, why bother listing yourself as a corresponding author if you won’t respond to people who contact you about your work, people who plan to cite your publications and use your results? People who have taken the time to actually read your papers and care enough to reach out to you?
I have emailed countless scientists in recent years. I spend a great deal of time and effort carefully crafting these emails so they are succinct, specific, and (if possible) pose questions in yes/no or A/B formats (“I can’t make out detail XYZ in Fig 1 in the pdf—is it scenario A or B?”). My entire goal is to craft questions that can be answered efficiently—in a single sentence if possible.
Despite this effort, I estimate I only get one response for every ten emails I send.
Can anybody help me understand why researchers aren’t more accessible and responsive? In my mind, if someone has taken the time to read my paper, cares enough to contact me, and wants to somehow use my work, I would want to do everything I could to support that or clarify an ambiguity.
My advice: please don’t be a broken cog in this system.
It is called, after all, scientific communication.
11 Jan 2012
•
Teaching
I get emails every day from students seeking help with various things. Most of them have a decent grasp on how to handle this exchange professionally, but I still manage to get emails that look like this:
From: eecummings@gatech.edu
To: me@gatech.edu
Subject: problem
Body: i cant get the answer to 3.14
What is wrong with this? Plenty: nondescript subject line, no greeting, no proper capitalization, no punctuation, no signature, no “thank you”, and most critically… no actual question!
These types of emails don’t usually get a super helpful response from me. I’ll typically try to give a quick pointer related to what I think they’re trying to ask, but it’s a shot in the dark.
Instead, if you want to get awesome help, here is how to write a professional email to a professor:
- Write a descriptive subject line.
- Write a salutation: “Dear Mr. Deaton” or “Dear Ben” is great.
- Give some succinct context. “I’m a student in your MW COE2001 course. I’ve been working on the homework and am stuck on problem 3.14 (on page 56). I’ve tried methods A, B, and C.”
- Ask a clear question with a direct call to action. In other words, make it obvious what you want from me. Do you want to set up a meeting? Do you want a pointer on how to set up the moment equilibrium equation?
- Thank me for my time. I’ve got plenty on my plate, so this is common courtesy.
- Sign your full name.
Disclaimer: Some assistant professor friends of mine put me up to writing this post so they could circulate it among their classes.
Update (2012-01-15): A reader pointed me to Michael Leddy’s How to Email a Professor, which is a great read on the topic.
05 Jan 2012
•
Productivity
I read an interesting piece recently by Matt Might looking at artificial scarcities and the cost related to duplicating items vs. carting them back and forth from, say, home and work. Here is how Might defines an artificial scarcity…
An artificial scarcity arises when the cost of duplication
is less than the lifetime opportunity cost of traveling with or to a good.
Several examples Might gives include: keeping an umbrella in each car, a screwdriver on each floor of the house, a tube of Chapstick in each room, etc. But these are all inexpensive items. But what about items of non-trivial cost?
What is the cost of packing up a laptop power adapter and carrying it with you versus the cost of having an extra adapter at the office?
For example, the cost of traveling with the adapter combines the mental burden of remembering to take the adapter with the opportunity cost of time spent packing and unpacking and the space lost in your bag.
Suppose you spend a minute each day packing and unpacking the adapter. Within a year, you’ve lost about six hours to just packing and unpacking your adapter.
In an interview on The Setup, Might elaborates:
You will find 85 Watt MagSafe laptop power adapters (sometime two) pre-installed everywhere we frequent in my house: the couch (x 2), the kitchen desk, the home office (x 2), the rocking chair and the bed. Another lives permanently in my travel bag.
This was pure validation for me because a few years ago, I bought a separate Apple laptop charger for my office, despite the pain the $80 caused my grad student budget. For me, it wasn’t the time spent packing and unpacking—it was simply the annoyance. My office power outlet is inconvenient to access, packing it up gets my hands dirty, and the charger is a non-trivial addition to the weight of my bag.
Now, I arrive in my office, yank out my MacBook Pro, and plug in the cable that’s waiting on my desk. When I’m ready to head out, I grab my laptop and I’m off.
Now I have some fancy words to justify this.
Source: Matt Might: End artificial scarcities to increase productivity
04 Jan 2012
•
Academia
Richard Feynman on how to find a new law:
“If it disagrees with experiments, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, who made the guess or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiments, it’s wrong—that’s all there is to it.”
Via Feynman: The Key to Science
03 Jan 2012
•
Meta
Creating this weblog has been a fun experiment and nice distraction during the past year of graduate school. I’ve learned a lot from interacting with so many smart people, and writing here is one of my favorite diversions.
That said, I have decided to embark on a new experiment: renaming the blog and moving it away from an eponymous domain. I had actually always wanted to name it something else—I have a Namecheap account full of registered domain name ideas to prove it—but never settled on something I was crazy about, until now.
The new name? “Only A Model”
Why?
- It conveys a key message in my field of research: all scientific or numerical models have limitations. It conveys what—on some level—the blog is about.
- I want to start improving the quality of the posts and focusing my writing on the research topics I care about. I think the new name gives the site a more focused identity.
- It’s short, memorable, and easy to spell/type.
- It’s general. It doesn’t constrain me to only discussing FEA or structural modeling, for example.
- I got tired of constantly linking to a website that starts with my name. Personally, I started feeling too egocentric about it. I don’t project that onto other eponymous bloggers—that’s just me.
- It’s a Monty Python reference.
So we’ll see how it goes. One of the things I love about this day and age is that nothing is so permanent anymore. If I don’t like this setup a year from now, I can change it anyway I like—no harm done.
If you have any helpful feedback or suggestions, please do let me know. I hope you enjoy the changes and look forward to the next year of interaction and ideas.
You are cordially invited: Only A Model