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Expectations

I hope my legacy isn't power and status. I find fulfillment in understanding things, building things, and helping make the world better. I hope you'll do the same.

What is a PhD?

The original purpose of a PhD is to create a new independent research scholar.

What do I expect from you?

I am your advisor—not your supervisor, or teacher. Often, I don't know the answers to our research questions either.

Core Expectations

First and foremost, adhere to our group's values. Have ideas and work hard on them because you genuinely find them interesting.

I hope you strive to leave a mark, so people might say, "she's the person who did X." Achieving this typically requires growing independent of my ideas and pursuing what truly drives you. This direction often isn't clear at the beginning of a PhD, but I want you to reach that point and will support your journey there.

Think for yourself and from first principles. After time in any field, avoiding "group think" becomes difficult. Question everything—what I say, what the field says. Do things others don't do but should do.

Specific Expectations

Take ownership. If I start caring more about your project than you do, something is wrong. Don't do things just because someone told you to. Understand why you're doing what you're doing. Only one person has solely your best interests in mind—you. My interests will largely overlap with yours but won't be identical.

Communicate openly. You cannot expect telepathy. Tell me if you see something you dislike, could improve, or that annoys you. What seems obvious to you may not be obvious to others. That is, manage up and tell me if something does not work for you. (See: "The care and maintenance of your adviser")

Iterate rapidly. Your first ideas will likely fail—that's normal. Deal with this by executing and iterating as fast as possible, not by thinking your way to the perfect solution. (See also the importance of velocity).

Take action. Don't ask for permission. Rather ask for forgiveness. If you wonder "should I do this experiment?" the answer is probably yes. If there is a decision to take and the worst outcome is reversible (i.e. no serious reputation risk and <1k cost) just take the decision you think is best (and aligns with our vision and values).

Use your judgment when things are ambiguous. When I leave things vague, I'm trusting you to decide. Bias toward action — in most cases, just doing stuff doesn't hurt. If you concretize something I left open, I will not hold that against you. I'd rather you act and we course-correct than you wait and nothing happens. I don't want to decide exactly how you write your notes — but I do want you to keep lab notes. I don't want to prescribe the exact format of a pitch — but I do want you to make one. I don't want to decide whether you use random forests or XGBoost — but I do want you to be able to justify the choice.

Produce outputs. You'll be evaluated on your outputs. Your projects don't have to succeed—most will fail—but you must conduct real experiments that produce real data we can examine and learn from. Make graphs. Take good notes.

Work-Life Balance

While we strive for impactful, ambitious work, we shouldn't sacrifice well-being and happiness..

Key principles:

  • Your personal well-being matters more than work
  • Take vacation days 100% guilt-free—enjoy quality time with family and friends without diluting it with work
  • Sick days are not vacation days
  • Leverage academia's freedom—intense periods alternate with slower ones; rest when exhausted during slow periods
  • You're not expected to work evenings or weekends unless facing immovable deadlines and managing time well during the week
  • Stick to core working hours (10:00 a.m. to 4 p.m.) for personal interactions; if family obligations require different hours, tell me what works best

Get stuff done

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not. -- Thomas Henry Huxley

Keep in mind that scarcity is value. Most projects start with a lot of excitement, but at some point, it is no fun anymore. Quitting at this dip is a bad point to quit. Pushing through it is hard—but it being hard is what creates scarcity and thus value. If you were to quit, you should have quit earlier. This does not mean that you should not quit. It means that you should quit many things earlier and then push the thing worth pushing through the dip.

Finally, learning to get things done eliminates job worries. As Elbert Hubbard noted in 1899, capable people always find opportunities.

Plot a lot, be obsessed with your data

It is so easy to believe that you understand what your pipeline is doing. But in practice, I almost always found that there are still bugs and that I do not really understand what is going on. Thus, plot a lot. Plot everything. Plot it again. Plot it differently. Plot it in different ways. Plot it until you understand what is going on. Every input, every output, every intermediate step. Plot it all. There is some overhead in the beginning, but it will save you so much time later on.

I am a very visual thinker. If you want me to help you, help me by showing me plots.

Daily Operations

Beyond the official rules from the institute/university:

  • Any absence (vacation, sick leave, work from home) must be indicated in the Group Calendar. I need to know where you are in case something happens here (e.g., the fire alarm goes off and the fire brigade needs to know who is in the building).
  • If you have commitments to external collaborators near a vacation or absence, resolve them before you leave or communicate the delay to all parties in advance.
  • If you are sick, please stay at home. If you are not well enough to work, you should not come to the office.
  • I would like us to be in the office in person most days for core working hours of 10:00–16:00.
  • You must take lab notes. Lab notes are both a legal requirement and valuable for your own research process. If using GitHub and Wandb as lab notebooks works for you, great. If you prefer our group Notion or another system, that works too — the key is having documentation of your work that is accessible to the group.
  • If we curse or talk bad about someone else's work without specific reasons or context (e.g., "this is stupid") we deduct cake points in the GroupOS. This is to avoid negative talk without context. If you have a problem with someone's work, address it constructively. This applies to all violations of the Code of Conduct.
  • At a university, most things are bought with taxpayer money. Treat shared resources with care — this includes infrastructure such as toilets.

Scientific Outputs

  • Run any scientific output (paper, abstract, poster, collaboration request, ...) by Kevin before it leaves the group.
  • Add any output (poster, talk, presentation, award, ...) you produce to our database.

Meetings

For how meetings work — preparation, attendance, and follow-up — see Meetings and Rituals.

The key points:

  • Attendance: If you're invited to a meeting — especially with external collaborators — your attendance is expected unless you've discussed a conflict with Kevin in advance. "In advance" means as early as possible, not the evening before. If something comes up, bring it to Kevin so we can figure it out together. Don't decide on your own not to attend and inform him after the fact.
  • Calendar invites: Accept or decline promptly. If you cannot make a Jour Fixe, decline the event so the other person can use the time.
  • Jour fixe preparation: See Jour Fixe for agenda requirements.

Travel

See the dedicated Travel page for booking, reimbursement, invoicing, and guest travel guidelines.

Self-Calibration

Several group members have asked for concrete benchmarks to assess their own progress. Knowledge work is hard to measure, and research works in cycles — exploration phases differ from execution phases, and the first year of a PhD looks different from the last. These are not targets to hit every week. They are rough reference points, averaged over longer periods, to help you spot patterns and have informed conversations about your development.

Lenses for Self-Reflection

GitHub activity: Averaged over the year, you should probably have more GitHub activity than Kevin — because you're actively doing research while he's managing. Most of our work should be open science on GitHub, documenting the research process and collaborating there. This is not about lines of code or PR counts, just one lens to consider.

Writing: Writing is thinking. If you're averaging less than 1,000 words per week (across papers, documentation, notes, proposals, etc.), that might be a signal worth examining. Most active researchers naturally write much more when they're fully engaged.

Reading: Are you reading 3–4 papers per week? Reading helps you stay current and generate ideas. It is a long-term investment that might seem like something you can put off for something urgent, but that does not work long-term.

Papers: As a PhD student, averaging at least one core paper per year (where you're the main driver) is a reasonable goal.

Conference travel: Too much travel fragments focus; too little reduces visibility. Find the right balance for your career stage.

Accountability: For the things you commit to, do you regularly underdeliver or overdeliver?

LLM use: How much of your thinking, writing, and coding do you outsource to LLMs? What skills do you lose or not develop this way?

Reflection: Do you regularly step back and reflect on your process and priorities? Do you do your own postmortems to see where you deviated from plans and why? When you come to jour fixes, are you bringing your own ideas and asking for feedback, or primarily asking for solutions? Both have their place, but as you progress, you should increasingly be the source of ideas and plans. Do you know where you're heading and why? Do you reflect on how your profile compares to the pool of applicants for positions you'd want?

Using these benchmarks

If you look at these and feel good about where you are — great. If you see areas you'd like to develop, bring them to a jour fixe or personal development discussion. The point is self-awareness, not pressure. If you're going through a difficult period — illness, personal challenges, burnout, feeling stuck — talk to Kevin about it. We can figure out what support would help, but that partnership requires honesty from both sides.

What can you expect from me?

I will adhere to our group's values—call me out if I don't. You can expect availability for advice on research projects and career questions.

Specific commitments:

  • Individual personal development plans revised annually
  • Project ideas, especially early in your career
  • Career advice and network support
  • Technical guidance on projects
  • Collaborator on code and paper
  • Feedback that pushes significant growth
  • An environment enabling your highest-standard work—tell me what would help you work better, more efficiently, or more conveniently

I'm ultimately responsible for everything in the group. Blame typically goes to me, not you. Credit goes to you—your career benefits more from recognition than mine does.

Reference Letters

I want to be transparent about something. When you apply for jobs, I will write you the strongest reference letter I honestly can. I want to advocate for you. But a reference letter reflects what I've observed — your reliability, your independence, your collaboration, your output. If I've seen you deliver consistently, meet commitments, communicate well with collaborators — that's what I can write about enthusiastically. If I've seen missed deadlines, dropped commitments, and collaborators chasing me for updates — I can't pretend otherwise. I won't sabotage you. But I also won't invent strengths I haven't seen. The best thing you can do for your reference letter is to give me things to write about.

What you shouldn't expect from me

Don't expect detailed plans and solutions for research questions. If I already knew the answers, research would be pointless. I'm happy to discuss different approaches to problems, but if I could write detailed project plans, these would be engineering projects, not research.

Perhaps also give "Your Advisor Has Five Impossible Jobs" a read.