Self Promotion
You have to adverise what you are doing. Make sure everybody knows. The parts that are hard, advertise that you’re working on them. Even better if you can explain why they are hard to you.
Status Reports
Professor Matthew Ando gave a beautiful explanation about writing papers, which I will paraphrase. Professor Ando always wanted his work in algebraic topology to look like complex analysis. The problem is that the complex analysis we see now was developed over 200 years. The proofs have been refined and polished; they look beautiful. New work doesn’t look like that. Matthew says that every year you should publish a paper about what you have been working on. Don’t wait for perfection. It might not come in your lifetime.
Advice
Apply Professor Ando’s attitude in all of your advanced coursework.
- Talk about your work.
- Communicate what you have done
- Presenting difficulties is critically important. Nothing goes without a hitch, and how you handle the difficulties is a super-important skill. It is also a great predictor of how you will handle future challenges. Train for that!
- Polish isn’t necessary, but show evidence. It can help to think ahead of time about how you might create evidence. People stage their Instagram photos carefully. Apply the same idea to your academic work.
Advertising
Plenty of Whitney Young students are good at communicating. If you’re not one of them, study what they do. Learn from them while you have the chance. It’s a lifetime skill.
- JK - Regular emails. This is what I did. This code has bugs in it somewhere, because sometimes it merges these two tiles that it isn’t supposed to.
- TH - In the office hours, grappling with what comes next, talking about the outline. How do you debug this?
- JR - Honest when nothing is getting done. Proud of adding new features. How does my code rank vs others.
- KL - Complain about all of the work you do. Yes, this counts as self-promotion. Explain how to have become super-efficient doing work.
- EN - Love what you do. Talk about the most interesting things you have seen or read recently. Build on what interests you.