Recovering from bad impressions with potential advisers

[Turnader]

Hi, just discovered these forums, and boy am I glad! I desperately need to vent!

So I am just about to start my PhD program in biology at a school that I chose not because of any faculty member in particular, but because is a strong academic community for the sub-field I'm interested in. Because my interests tend to be more theoretical, and not limited to specific species, I'm allowing our required lab rotations to help me make a decision on an adviser.

I contacted a professor that was particularly appealing because much of their research has applied health uses, and got a positive response with a question about what specifically I wanted to work on. In an attempt to impress him, I looked at recent publications and tried to take the "next step" theoretically, and sent a skeleton proposal of something I could investigate while in his lab. That was a mistake.

You see, while I have extensive knowledge in evolutionary theory, my knowledge is not specialized in too many specific species (his lab has things that I've never worked on before and am vaguely familiar with).This ended up making my proposal sound pretty awful, and the prof didn't pull any punches in explaining that to me. While not particularly rude in his response, the tone of his message was clearly very annoyed, as if i was just wasting his time. He suggests just throwing me on an ongoing project (which is just what I wanted in the first place).

Now I feel like I screwed up an opportunity with a potential adviser (out of the the faculty I could see myself working with, he ranked no.1) and I can't help but get this panicky feeling that I messed up a big opportunity. Anyone have similar bad impressions, but turned out all right? Could really use a couple stories like that right about now.

[TakeruK]

I don't think you did anything terrible. The worst possible scenario, I think, is that you came off as thinking you knew a lot but it turns out that you didn't know as much as you think. So the prof could be understandably annoyed that instead of joining his lab doing one of his projects, you gave the impression that you thought you knew better or that you are overestimating your own abilities. 

 

I think it's generally true that students think way more about their relationship with their advisor than the advisor. He probably will forget about this aspect of you soon enough when he sees your real work and meets more new students. You are likely overanalysing the situation and it would help to just focus on your future interactions with him! Forget it ever happened!

[fuzzylogician]

I have good news and bad news. Making a mistake in front of your advisor or not knowing something that (you think) you should know will become part of your life from now on, so you had better get used to it! You go to school precisely so you can learn and because you don't already know everything. It is expected that you'll make mistakes, the more so when you're new. When you just start out, you don't even realize everything that you don't know. This is not meant to discourage you, just to help you change your way of thinking. I'm sure your advisor wasn't happy that you made a mistake or overestimated your knowledge, but it's also not a huge shock. He'll soon forget about this incident when you two start interacting in person, if he hasn't already.

 

Bottom line: this kind of event isn't particularly out of the ordinary and I don't think there is anything for you to worry about. You certainly haven't screwed up an opportunity or done anything remotely near that level of messing up. You still have every opportunity of joining this lab, if you end up deciding you like it after you've rotated there.

[St Andrews Lynx]

I wouldn't worry too much about it. I'd be surprised if yours was the worst research proposal that this PI had seen from a new grad student. Personally, I reckon it is better to make plenty of (relatively) small mistakes in the beginning, so that you reduce the risk of making larger & more serious f-ups further down the line.

 

In the past when I've made mistakes or poorly-executed something, the PI hasn't pulled any punches in telling me what I did wrong. Up until working for those PIs I'd been used to having my feedback sugar-coated - initially I took their criticism a lot more personally than it was intended, and assumed their comments were indicative or something more severe than they actually were. While the feedback from your new PI might have sounded harsh, he perhaps wasn't that annoyed about the bad proposal.

 

Your best bet is to just toe the line with the established research project for the duration of your research project. If you prove to be a hard, efficient worker who gets on well with the rest of the group, then I don't see why your slip-up at the start will even be considered when the PI comes to selecting grad students. 

[somethinbruin]

^^ I agree with all of the above. My best adviser was a no-nonsense, take no prisoners sort of personality. It took some getting used to, but once you got to know him, you realized that he wasn't being "mean." He was actively trying to professionalize graduate students, and that means taking criticism.

 

My worst advisers have been the ones who never give critical feedback--everything is always fine and dandy. That approach is particularly worthless since it doesn't challenge grad students or give them anywhere to grow. If a professor reads a 30 page paper that I wrote and doesn't write at least a few critical comments, I assume he didn't read it. 

 

Also, my first experience with my MA adviser was a disaster, in my opinion. He wasn't my adviser at the time, but I still felt like a royal ass--I felt like I said and wrote all of the wrong things, and he called me on all of them. At the time, it was just my attempt to integrate myself into a higher level of academic discourse. We learn by making mistakes, and good advisers will point out mistakes but not hold them against you as long as you learn from it and don't repeat them. I soon realized that was how my adviser operates. A few months later I asked him to be my MA adviser, and we had a great relationship. He helped me get my thesis across the finish line, and I was his research assistant this summer on several publications. I will miss his (sometimes gruff) guidance now that I'm at a different school for my PhD. So take heart, collaborations that begin on shaky ground can become productive, long term working relationships once you get to know each other. 

[Turnader]

Thanks for the replies! I really am feeling quite better about the whole thing. It's just gonna take some getting used to, my primary undergraduate research mentor was a very supportive and helpful--but wouldn't refrain from criticism, he just always had a knack of putting things gently. Even when I messed up bad, correction was always in a "I know you'll do better next time" tone.