From his blog, here. Dan is a fellow collaborator on NSF’s SAGE project. He is also the new chair of the National Science Board.

Happy to link to my friend Tyler’s blogpost this morning, here. As Tyler would say: self-recommending.

The scientific training process in graduate school is fundamentally different than the classes and labs at the undergraduate level. A key part of graduate-level training is the active listening that I referred to in Blogpost #4. What this means is a regular spacing of questions (from you) relative to what you’ve just heard from the professor on the other end of the line. A good conversation of this sort can have as many as twenty or so of these talk-question intervals. As you progress in your training, the talk-question intervals regularly reverse: you’ll get the chance eventually to talk with your mentor asking the regular questions. This process works fairly similarly on-line (Zoom or Teams) as it does in person. The key however is that you have to carefully listen to the other person talking in order to ask a question (there is no single correct question) that meets muster.

Our latest publication, here.

So you’ve got yourself a Zoom appointment with a scientist who may be able to help your career. If you are able to, through your college or university (i.e. you can initiate a Zoom call of an hour in length), offer to create the Zoom link yourself. Do be on time (this is critical) and be certain to have a professional appearance for the camera.

As you begin the call, use the words “informational interview” to describe your goal for the conversation. This term conotes that there are no expectations of an offer (job other educational) from the scientist. You will be probably asked to introduce yourself: what this means is to state your name and then to give a short (no longer than 2-3 minute) backgrounder on your undergraduate education to date, your major, what science experiences (including courses and labs) might be relevant. You statement stops with a sentence or two on how you discovered the work of this person (your target) and what papers of hers/his you have read. At this point you get ready to listen.

What is required is active listening. This means engaging visually with the person via the camera. Nodding when appropriate and taking notes so that you can ask intelligent questions. This is really key. The scientist on the other end of the Zoom needs to be able to “feel” your attention. More on this in the next blog post.

In this blogpost, I describe the most important step: making individual contact with each of your faculty targets. First let me start out with the don’ts:

• Do not use social media of any kind
• Do not text
• Do not even think about using a template

First, use determine the work email of your faculty targets. So this means, the email associated with the place that employs them. For example, in my case, you would want my George Mason University email. I leave it as an exercise on how to get that piece of information, but Google usually works well. Second, you are going to compose a long email to each of your faculty targets in which you will primarily communicate your knowledge of their scholarship/research and your ideas about what you think should be the ‘next experiment’ (Note, for non-bench type professors, this would be the next natural step of scholarly inquiry). Finally, you’ll communicate your interest in carrying out this research while presumably under their guidance as mentor/academic advisor or employer. Also, make clear that you would be overjoyed to do a Zoom informational interview with them at their convenience.

Note, I added nothing about yourself. That’s correct. At this stage, other than a cursory ‘I’m an undergrad at X University majoring in Y’, it’s not about you. Your sole goal in this communication is to convey in the clearest language possible that you are deeply familiar with their research and that you have been thinking about how to add value to their research work flow. When they circle back to you (and if you do this correctly, they surely will), that’s when you can talk about your self and your professional dreams/goals.

In the next blogpost, we’ll talk about your Zoom.

How to read those papers: very carefully. Start with Discussion section (last part of the paper). Read it to find out what new knowledge is being reported. Note the papers that have been cited to buttress the conclusions and plan to at least read the abstract of those papers. Now go back and read the paper from the beginning (starting with the title and author order/affiliations). For natural science papers (in general), the first author is the trainee who did the work. The last author is the professor/principle investigator (i.e. the person who you want to connect with). The middle authors are listed from left to right in order of the magnitude of their contributions to the work. Often there is a note at the end of the paper that lists who did what work by their initials. Note this also. As you read the paper pay particular attention to each figure and its associated figure legend. Those figures are the heart of the paper. It is particularly important to look at each figure critically. Does it actually support what the legend is purporting? Read the paper in its entirety twice. At the end of the last read, immediately write down for yourself what scientific questions have been ‘opened up’ by the publication of the paper. In other words, what should the next experiment be? You’ll need this for the next steps.

I learned this from my parents (who were both faculty at Caltech). It has continued to be good advice through the years. Step one is to decide who to connect with. Make sure your horizons are broad enough. Look beyond your major at your university. Look beyond your school. Connections, particularly as mentors, can be global. Realize that a more junior faculty person may have more time for you, but eventually has to actively put their own interests first–they are trying to get tenure. A more senior faculty member, might have less time, but have a more altruistic agenda. Above all, look for faculty members who are doing research/scholarship in areas that you could visualize yourself being passionate about.

Prune your list. It should be no larger than 10 individuals. You can prune your list based on various constraints: information that you’ve gleaned from other students/peers, googling and similar due diligence, interest in their research. Make certain that they are still actively publishing in the field you think you are interested in (people change directions). Then, make an appointment with google scholar or pub med and download the most recent two papers for each person on your list. Read those papers very carefully and make notes.

Stay tuned for the next blogpost.

Hat tip Tyler Cowen, the link is here. A couple of thoughts on this:

• I’m not sure NSF is aware of the crypto-side of this new ecosystem
• I’m pretty sure that university sponsored program offices aren’t either

So it may be quite challenging for established academic scientists to play in these sandboxes because of reporting/compliance requirements of the legacy funding systems. How do you make a list of your current and pending funding in bitcoin?

From independent AI researcher, John Wentworth, at the blog Less Wrong, here.

And John’s version of his bio with some gentle editing for salty language:

I’m an independent researcher working on AI alignment and the theory of agency. I’m 29 years old, will make about $90k this year, and set my own research agenda. I deal with basically zero academic bull&%$& – my grant applications each take about one day’s attention to write (and decisions typically come back in ~1 month), and I publish the bulk of my work right here on LessWrong/AF. Best of all, I work on some really cool technical problems which I expect are central to the future of humanity.