Academic Love

In grad school (and beyond, I imagine), hardly anyone ever tells you "Good Job!"  There are few formalized performance reviews and no bonuses for doing good work.  My strategy is to look for things that are like telling you "good job" without explicitly saying those words.

One of the other grad students in my lab and I trade the good comments our advisor says about the other one.  Sometimes when I'm talking to my advisor about my project, it's all very technical and the discussion is focused on where the project is going and how I'm going to get there.  But if my advisor mentions my project to one of the other grad students in the lab, he tends to be a lot less technical and focus on how great my project is or how far it's come or how excited he is about my latest result.  If my advisor mentions how awesome another student's project is to me, I always remember to tell that student that our advisor thinks their work is awesome, and there's another student that does the same for me.  It's always nice to hear that my advisor is excited about my work!


However, the real currency in the research world is time and attention.  If someone spends time with me talking about my work, and thinks hard enough about it to ask me good questions, that's academic love.  My friends have spent hours grilling me to help me prepare for qualifying exams-  and I think that's the nicest thing they've done for me.  The people who have really ripped in to my research are telling me a few things aside from all the things I need to address in my work: that they think I am capable of doing excellent work and they respect me as a researcher.  After one particularly grueling session with me, my advisor, and some big name researchers, my advisor made some comment about how I seemed elated.  Of course I was elated, big names were paying thoughtful attention to my work!  It was awesome.

Ironically, this means that someone just saying "good job" without any further comments is about the worst feedback I can get.  I suppose "terrible job" with no further comments would be worse, but I haven't had that happen. Yet.   Anyway, these short comments generally mean that whoever hasn't really thought about whatever I'm working on.


As for showing academic love, I really enjoy helping people (well, people I like) with their work when I can.  Reading application essays,  listening to people talk about their grant ideas and asking questions, teaching people software, and listening to someone talk through the homework problems when they are stuck are all things I have done for people I like and truly believe will succeed.  I do try to be explicit and tell people when they have done a good job, or at least when I first started being in a position where I could tell people they did a good job I did.  Lately I have been forgetting.  I think the longer you have been in the academic system the easier it is to forget to say the implied "good job."  Would it make research a nicer or easier place to be if we remembered to say it, or is the implicit system good enough?