Is it better for silk worms to be boiled alive so that silk fabric can be made (possibly by child labor), or for synthetic fabric to be made from petroleum?
Do other people have struggles supervising their elders? I realize that this is tied into my personality, but I am having trouble with confidence in supervising an employee older than me. Last August we (boss and I) asked said person - I'll dub Jack - to write a project report - a simple report with small dataset I thought would be a good to start for this PhD to get more involved in helping us crank out reports. Nothing happened - Jack has low self confidence in analyzing and writing. In Sept. I cranked out the stats so Jack only had to write. Nothing. Boss and I should have acted last year. I just sent an email to boss and Jack suggesting that Jack doesn't work on anything else for the rest of the month - just work on the report. And now Jack is scrambling around looking for literature asking me and boss questions.
Jack frustrates me. but more frustrating is my lack of confidence in saying get this done! As of last year it should have been done and I should have cracked the whip. 10 yrs ago I had trouble transitioning to being the supervisor of students I had been a fellow student with. So I suppose this is another round of growing pains.
So - what do you do when you review a paper written by a grad student that looks like it was thrown together just to get something together? The throwing together part should have been done by the end of the summer. And the student complains about the project and to me seems like he's doing this just to jump through the hoops. It's a non-thesis project. And my boss is the advisor and is the one who tried (I think) to spur the student on to get stuff done. But now I'm editing the paper which is work to fulfill a grant that was over in Sept., so we have to get the paper together by the end of Dec. The paper is more like an outline of what to write. And I kept telling the student to keep track of all the data manipulations b/c they'll have to be documented - I doubt he has - it's not in the 'paper.' For every part I'm saying expand on this, and on the front wrote 'great start, I had to rewrite my 1st thesis draft too.' Criminy. If he at least didn't complain about everything it would be an easier pill to swallow that he struggles with writing. So I guess I can't do anything but say expand on this. How do you profs deal with students???
Bob Hagen seemed to take affront when I suggested that R is actually a graduate student torturing device. Hard to tell if someone's affronted on email, but I got a long explanation of how such a thing could exist without the scheming of even a single sadistic evil genius... I'm still waiting to be convinced that I'm wrong, though!
