CNERG Community Expectations

• Advisor Expectations
  • Duties of your Advisor
  • Expectations of your Advisor
  • Semester Review
• Student Expectations
  • Research Progress
  • Research Documentation
  • Publications
  • Presenting Your Work
• Community Interactions
  • Meeting Attendance
  • Office Hours
  • Software/Code Review
  • Working with Scientists
  • Working with PhD Committees
• Professional Development and Growth
  • Literature Review
  • Seminars
  • Internships
  • Technical Conferences and Professional Networks

Advisor Expectations

One defining requirement of my job as a professor is to initiate interesting research that will make contributions to science and to society. My success depends on mentoring people like you as you help me carry out that research. That mentoring will have many faces, but ultimately you will need to work independently on an original contribution to earn your degree.

Duties of your Advisor

One of my primary duties is to represent our research group externally by

• writing proposals for new and innovative research ideas,
• bringing in financial resources to support research needs,
• writing journal articles and conference papers,
• attending meetings and workshops,
• participating in professional societies, and
• performing other professional services to the scientific community.

Your ability to independently produce quality research products makes it easier for me to succeed in my role, which should, in turn, enhance your graduate experience.

Expectations of your Advisor

You have a right to the following from me as your advisor:

• Maintenance/support of your research tools and environment to maximize your research progress,
• Financial support to attend conferences to present CNERG research,
• Timely review of your research products,
• Access to my time to individually address questions and obstacles to your research,
• Constructive assessment of the quality and progress of your research,
• Guidance for your academic progress and plan,
• Management of the health of the CNERG community,
• Flexibility in accommodating individual circumstances, and
• Opportunities for you to provide feedback on my role as an advisor.

Semester Review

A private meeting at the beginning of January and July will provide an opportunity to review your research progress and performance as a researcher under the expectations described here. This will also provide you a time to provide feedback to me on my role as an advisor. You will be asked to provide a formal report of the following: Your progress during the previous time period, including a self-assessment of that work, your goals for the coming semester, any concerns of frustrations you have with the CNERG community, including myself.

Student Expectations

Research Progress

You are expected to make steady progress towards your research goals at all times. We will work together to establish short, medium and long term goals, including milestone dates and deliverables. Over time you will become increasingly responsible for independently defining these goals. During the academic semester, performing well in your courses is certainly important, but should not result in a complete lack of research productivity.

Completing a graduate degree should be viewed as a full time professional job, with commensurate workload. While CNERG is committed to allowing everyone to maintain a healthy work-life balance, and graduate degrees are not awarded for effort alone, the more time spent on your academic and research tasks, the more quickly you should be able to graduate.

Research Documentation

The best way to track your own research progress is to keep good documentation of your work. In a traditional laboratory environment, this meant keeping a detailed lab notebook that described all the research tasks you carried out each day. In our computational research environment, the need for documentation is not diminished. Please keep a detailed record of your work as it will both help us understand results that you are producing as well as avoid repeating efforts that have proven unsuccessful in the past. An electronic record is suitable as long as it in a location with robust storage including duplication or backups.

Publications

Journal publications are the most important way to share your knowledge and creativity with the rest of the scientific community. Students pursuing a Masters degree will be expected to author or make major contributions to at least one journal paper submission. Students pursuing a doctoral degree will be expected to author at least two journal papers submissions. More publications are possible depending on how the work progresses, and different career paths have different expectations for publications. In many cases, these publications will be directly related to your thesis research and will contribute to your ability to communicate your final research product. For a Masters student, their paper might loosely align with the completion of their thesis. For a PhD student, these publications might loosely align with their Preliminary Exam and their defense.

Reviewing student writing is one of the most time-consuming and important parts of my job. The ability to write well about your research will demonstrate a deep understanding and amplify your scientific successes. We will work together to identify strategies for improving your writing throughout your training. Over time you will become a more independent writer, needing less feedback from me to achieve high quality publications. For publications that we co-author, you can expect me to directly edit and rewrite sections. However, you will be the sole author of your thesis – I will offer comments, suggestions and other feedback but will not edit or rewrite sections.

Presenting Your Work

Presenting your work at conferences is an important way to draw attention to your contributions and leads to valuable interactions with peers about your research. We will work together to identify the most relevant conferences for your work and track the frequency and submission deadlines in order to plan your participation. Both oral and poster presentations allow you to attach a personal element to your work and convince the audience to learn more about your research through your written publications. The quality of the presentations can be important in establishing your professional identity. We will work together to identify the most important information to include and the most effective way to present it, in both oral and poster presentations. Over time you will become comfortable at presenting your work to peers in a variety of formats and environments. You are encouraged to submit your work to technical conferences and will receive reasonable travel support to present your work. Travel to ANS Student conferences will generally not be supported.

Community Interactions

Fostering a sense of community requires regular interaction and individual investment in that community. The simplest way to contribute is by attending group meetings and spending time in your office during common hours. The combination of formal and informal interactions that results from these two simple steps creates a sense of familiarity that will directly contribute to our combined success. The strength of our community depends on collective commitment to these activities.

Meeting Attendance

In order to make productive contributions to the group you are required to attend and actively participate in appropriate CNERG meetings. These meetings are an important opportunity for all CNERG members to learn about and identify new connections to other members’ research. Furthermore, by being an active participant in the research group, you can share your experience and expertise to improve the quality of all the projects being pursued by the group. It may at times seem as though the work of others is not related to your own, but making an effort to understand their work will add creative energy to your own work and allow you to recognize the overlaps that are sure to exist.

Most CNERG meetings are setup to allow remote participation, intended for specific purposes including participating in meetings while living/working remotely or traveling. There may be rare circumstances where you need to work from home and choose to participate in a meeting, e.g. deliveries, illness, etc. In these situations, you should discuss with me whether it’s appropriate to participate remotely in meetings. Specifically, in the case of illness, please use your own judgment to determine whether you are well enough to participate.

Office Hours

Choosing when you will spend time in the office as a professional is a matter of finding a balance between your personal lifestyle and work habits and being available to me and colleagues for impromptu meetings and consultations. It is therefore necessary to establish some regular work-day hours, typically including the middle of the day, when you can generally be found in your office most days of the week.

Software/Code Review

Review of each other’s software is an important activity that contributes both to the quality of the software and the development of both the software author and software reviewer. Students are expected to regularly review each other’s software contributions using their own developing knowledge of programming best practices and algorithm design.

Working with Scientists

The CNERG community includes scientists and other staff who are a valuable part of your support network. Whether or not they have a formal role in evaluating your work, their guidance and input to your work should be considered in the same way as guidance and input from me. Similarly, you should expect their role in your research to be similar to that of me, including co-authorship on publications, when appropriate.

Working with PhD Committees

The members of your PhD committee should be considered a valuable resource to support your research progress. While it may be common to select these individuals for the expertise that they will bring to evaluating your finished work, this same expertise is often useful during the process of completing that work. There are likely to be facets of your research for which those committee members can provide more valuable advice than me, and they should be consulted on those topics. This will both improve the quality of the final work and also keep your committee members abreast of your progress, helping them better understand your completed work with less effort.

Professional Development and Growth

Literature Review

An important part of being a successful researcher is understanding the work that has already been done in your field and finding a place for your research in that body of research. Learning to use the literature review tools to locate relevant articles and then reading those articles will not only provide you with valuable information, but will also guide your research to ensure it can be an original contribution. We will work together to identify the best strategies for finding useful and interesting articles. Over time, you will become proficient at finding good quality articles that are relevant to your work. Reading other people’s published work will also contribute to improved writing skills. A goal of a detailed reading of a few publications per month is a good minimum standard.

Seminars

The Nuclear Engineering & Engineering Physics department conducts a regular seminar series with a wide range of topics from all the research areas of the department. These seminars are generally scheduled weekly and you should receive notification from the department office. All graduate students in the NEEP department are expected to attend these seminars. While it may be tempting to dismiss some topics as unrelated to your work, this is an opportunity to learn about a wide variety of interesting research. More importantly, it is common to find connections to your own work, even if they are weak connections, and in so doing you will develop a deeper understanding of the work you are pursuing.

Internships

Students are welcome to pursue internships at companies and national laboratories during their graduate studies, but these should be discussed and coordinated with me. Important considerations include academic milestones, student funding duration, and research deliverables. As students progress in their research, there will be a strong incentive for internships to be aligned to their own research efforts to allow them to continue making progress during the internship. In some instances, students have identified their PhD research projects during an internship when early in their plan.

Technical Conferences and Professional Networks

You are encouraged to attend technical conferences to as a way to engage with your technical community. We will discuss at which conferences it makes sense for you to present your CNERG research, with funding from the grants that support that research. You may also identify conferences that are valuable and interesting, beyond those for which you will receive financial support. (The Graduate School has programs to request support for travel to conferences.) The personal interactions that are possible in face-to-face meetings at conferences are uniquely valuable and are likely to provide near term input to your research and professional development as well as establish your place in a professional network for the long term. We will work together to identify important and relevant conferences and create ties to other scientists working in your field. Over time you will become connected to a network of peers and colleagues. Travel to ANS National Meetings and Student Conferences can be organized in conjunction with the UW-ANS Student Section.