Realistic Productivity - Expectations from PhD Students (Research Assistants)

[research_prof]

To a large extent, it has to do with you and your own career goals. You need to be a role model for your students if you expect them to work really hard--you cannot just disappear or not spend time with them, but expect your students to work harder than you. At the end of the day, it is your research group. You need to work harder than your students.

Please advise what do you mean by "You need to work harder than your students"....   What are the activities that you think an ideal advisor/supervisor should do that will inspire a PhD student and produce good research work...

First of all, to be available, respond to emails/messages in a timely manner, and actually spend time and supervise students. For example, if a student sends you an email today and you respond after 2 days (e.g., because it was a weekend and you do not check emails over weekends), that probably does not show you care about what this student is doing. Organize 1-on-1 weekly meetings with each of your PhD students to help them make progress, then have a group meeting every week with all your students and probably paper reading sessions too. Make them feel they belong to a strong research group. You can have a few social events every year as well so that students can bond with each other (when COVID allows, of course). You will also need to provide good career advising (e.g., identify when it is a good time for a PhD student to do an internship or apply for a fellowship, when to start job applications when they are about to graduate, whether to go industry or academia).

They also need to see that you are well-regarded in the research community. Publishing good papers, having good collaborators, getting grants, participating in editorial boards and TPCs can definitely inspire students.

Also, here is another skill you should master (which I have not done so yet..). Each student is different. You need to somehow weed out students that are struggling for legitimate reasons, but have potential from students that simply procrastinate. You do not want procrastinators or toxic students in your group--other students will see what they are doing and the fact that they get away with it and might try to do the same. My students, for example, know that I have essentially fired (and turned to TAs) PhD students that refused to work hard, so they have gotten the message that this is something that is not OK and will not be tolerated. That makes your research group smaller (which can be a problem if you have more money that what you can spend), however, students stay in your group for a reason: they are motivated enough to do good research.

[the_geneticist]

Be transparent with your students about what YOU are doing during the day - writing grants, reviewing manuscripts, committee work, etc.  Hold regular meetings: one-on-one with each of your students, as a lab group to discuss projects, as a lab group to discuss publications, with other lab groups to share work in progress.  Go to the seminars & tell your students you expect to see them there.  Take them to conferences.  Introduce them to your collaborators.  Make them present at any local/internal events (e.g. poster day in your department).  Teach them how to set a big future goal & how to write out a timeline of progress towards that goal.  Have them read your grant proposals & discuss how their project fits in to the bigger research goals.  Require them to write their own proposals for funding, even if you "don't need it".

In short, you are mentoring them in what it takes to be a thoughtful, well-connected scientist in your field.

[Ruralguy]

I don't teach graduate students, but what I can say from having been one and leading undergrads is that you need to regularly meet with them and define issues that you need to resolve. Is there some gap in knowledge that needs to be filled? Is there a lack of work ethic or lack of understanding about when someone can take vacation and that sort of thing? Can you get two students or more to work with each other? Can you seek out grant money that will help support the students and then have them work on the grant proposal next time around? Publishing a paper per year (first authored---or at least being the major author---don't need to get into debates about significance of "first author" by field)  sounds like too much even for a competitive group, but if you mean "working on 4 papers" per year, that might not be far off. Of course, for a large group, that amounts to a lot of published papers, it just doesn't mean that every grad student is always *publishing* lead work every year they are there.  I think it is important that students are working on *something*. They shouldn't be meandering, and there should be definable progress.  So, lets say its been almost two years and no real progress, and hard to define work somewhere out there....yeah, that student might be in trouble. If you have a lot of those, look in the mirror for the trouble.

[kerprof]

My expectation from my PhD students is that they produce (not publish because that's a different beast in CS as I explained above) 1 publication that can make it to a top-tier conference and 1 more high-quality publication that may or may not make it to a top-tier venue (but it can definitely make it to a good conference or journal) per year. Now, if I have a student that produces a paper that makes it to a top-tier conference, but does not produce another paper in a year, I will definitely not be unhappy.

So far, my first PhD student who works very hard and he is a very smart guy (he is in his second year) is able to follow this trajectory with quite a bit of paper writing help from me (but that's ok). I had a couple more PhD students, who could not keep up with that pace and they either left on their own when they realized that they needed to work hard or I had to let them go because they simply would not like putting in the necessary effort.

Does your students work purely as RA or do they work as TA or TA/RA? Also are your students enroll in courses... If so how much of that in dissertation credits?