Graduate Students Mentoring Plan (Poggio Lab)

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Graduate Students Mentoring Plan (Poggio Lab)

With students, I try to:

  •  provide constructive feedback
  •  provide encouragement and support
  •  look out for the student’s Interests
  •  treat students with respect
  •  provide a personal touch.

Please let me know when I fail, which happens more than I would like!

I expect every member of the group to come to most lab meetings, while recognizing there will inevitably be a few you’ll need to miss for various reasons.

I like students to be fully engaged in research. My group is for people who want to think about science most of the time and have fun doing that!

I encourage my graduate students to collaborate among themselves and with outside faculty and students: there is nothing more productive and fun than collaborating across  the boundaries of different areas of expertise.

I usually like students to have two or more projects. Ideally one is a bread-and-butter research project whose outcome is reasonably certain; the other is more blue-sky, longer term and entails a significant risk of failure but also great reward in case of success.

The ideal project is a mix of theory, computer implementations and neuroscience predictions but any two of those components are sufficient. Exceptions can be made of course.

I am available to discuss about the projects with each graduate student at any time: I prefer discussions driven by what happens in research rather than regular meetings. Expect me to be proactive and curious if you are silent for a while!

I like students to be skeptical in a constructive way of most published work (remember that probably 50% of all papers are wrong and much more is irrelevant) and to be critical in a similar way of what I say or write. I appreciate very much a student who points out an error in what I claim! Being critical is essential in science and having a very critical person in a research team is a must! This also means that you should be completely open with me about errors you may find in your research or papers.

I like to have prompt answers to my email, even just saying that you got it!