Way back when, when I went around interviewing for faculty jobs, there was one particular interview which I really enjoyed. Usually, you get to have a dizzying sequence of brief interviews with faculty members (no, this is not a tribute to David Foster Wallace), but in that one, unusually, I also got to meet with a delegation of graduate students. We had breakfast together and they asked me a few questions, and I got to see an aspect of the department you usually don’t get to see in an interview.
One question they asked stuck in my mind, maybe because I did not provide a good answer. Suppose you have a graduate student, just at the verge of discovering their own voice, maybe after completing their first project. They come to you with their first own idea, but the idea is not that great. It is not terrible, you cannot point out immediately any obvious flaws, but it doesn’t look like it is going to work out, and even if it does it may not be worth the effort. What do you do?
Ask them what led them to that idea and how it will advance their own understanding of the state of science. Let them come to their own conclusions.
People need the room to fail on their own for their own reasons.
The other possibility is that they are onto something but have not been able to express it well or that you are not open to some truth they see. Science often leaps ahead because of those who were following ideas that looked like dead ends to others.
- Curtis
Briefly outline your position and let him/her/it decide. Silly things like measuring rather than calculating g for a proton had their moments. Yang and Lee needed to overthrow particle physics to succeed. Ravings of a Swiss patent clerk were largely ignored when the first GPS satellite was orbited… but an engineer covered his butt with an offset just in case.
Discovery cannot be PERT-charted or budgeted. All discovery is insubordination. When hiring, the last question should always be, “are you lucky?” Look what Feynman did with a spinning Cornel dinner plate.
That’s got to be one of the toughest and most delicately human things there is. No mathematics for that one!
You have vastly more experience. You have been down many of the roads — probably many that he will never have to travel, because you have already traveled them, and shared what you’ve learned.
When something like this happens, you are more face to face that you have ever been. And this is when your character is tested.
I believe that humility is very important. You are in a position of power. Any biases you might have will be amplified, and may have far-reaching effects on this man’s future. Even when just casually thrown out there.
Where you are not completely certain, you have to be willing to question your very foundations. You must give them the benefit of the doubt. Let them be correct, and you are wrong, or ignorant. Join them in that place, and walk with them from there, together.
Keep your mind open along the way, and remain patient. They will learn immeasurably from you. And in all likelihood, you will learn a few things along the journey as well.
I’d tell them exactly what you think, gut feeling and all. You can tell them its a long shot, but they can try to pursue it for awhile and see if it gets anywhere.
When I was a grad student, I prefered proffessors who were uber critical of anything I might have been working on, rather than the ones who simply green lighted everything. The latter made me uneasy (as if im missing something obvious), the former is science.
If the student in question has already properly considered yoru critique beforehand or is onto something deep, 99.9% of the time he’ll know he/she is with an assurance that makes whatever you say irrelevant anyway. By contrast if they haven’t thought of the problem, they won’t have to waste their time on a deadend
If the student is coming up with his/her first good idea, regardless of the worth of the idea itself, the way you respond to that will determine whether or not they are going to come to you later with what might be a really good idea. Many smart students think a lot with their hearts when it comes to something outside of the lab notebook, thats just how it is. This isn’t the military, these are young minds who realize that they are broaching what could be turn out to be something really to someone far more experienced.
You need to treat them with the respect necessary. I personally know many super smart students who are just plain scared of their advisors, but are quite good at solving problems that other research teams encounter. I’m sure many can relate to this. Being tough may make a soldier out of this student, and maybe its necessary to boost the student’s confidence by posing tough questions, but if its or her first few ideas that actually seem credible, although not the best, then encourage them. They’re bringing out new ideas, let them do that. They’ll improve on their logic over time as they go do more research.
CORRECTION : LAST SENTENCE FIRST PARA:
…This isn’t the military, these are young minds who realize that they are broaching what could be turn out to be something really foolish to someone far more experienced.
The way I see it, the most important thing is to take the idea seriously. Even if you end up tearing the idea to pieces before the student potentially wastes time on it, do it in a manner that amounts to a serious discussion where the student is helped to convince him-/herself that the idea isn’t worth pursuing. I base this on personal experience from my first year as a PhD student: I went to my supervisor and said that I had this idea that we should look into a certain piece of mathematics and that I also needed to discuss some relevant papers I had dug out, to help my understanding of the theory. I came back some time later only to find out that supervisor hadn’t yet looked at the relevant papers. This was repeated three times over a period of a couple of months (I did other things as well in parallel). Supervisor never read those papers. After that my enthusiasm about the idea died and I ended up never going in that direction. In hindsight, what I was intending to do was — in addition to not being a particularly well formulated question — almost certainly a dead end any way. I could have lived with being told so. Instead I ended up feeling disinclined to discuss broader ideas about were to go.