In preparing for the upcoming series, Working in the lab, I thought that I’d share some words of wisdom from the first-ever e-mail I received from my doctoral advisor, Annie Lang.
I arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, on Jan. 2, 2002 to begin a joint doctoral program in Telecommunications and Cognitive Science.
Working with Annie remains one of the greta joys of my professional life.
Thankfully I save almost everything, so I have a record of our first e-mail exchange. I wrote at the end of my first year as a master’s student.
She wrote back the next morning, May 18, 2000, describing her program of research. In this e-mail she outlines what I have come to believe is the best way to run a lab:
I do think that the program here at Indiana is/can be very rigorous. In many ways our curriculum asks students to identify their interests and needs and goals and then design their own program, with the help of their committee, to get them there. For this reason it can be as challenging as you want to make it! The basic Ph.D. core is, I think, a solid group of courses.
Since you’ve read my work you probably already know that a lot of my work was/is done as a team effort – with graduate students. I expect my Ph.D. students to contribute to all aspects of the research done in the lab from data collection to analysis to coming up with ideas for future studies (not all of these at first but all of them by the end of your studies).
I like to think that my Ph.D. students, when they are done, are methodologically well trained, and theoretically proficient in the field in general – and then have their own specialties of which they know (I would hope) more than me.
It is always my hope that I will learn from my Ph.D. students, not just that they will learn from me. I expect them to branch out, learn more, and share the knowledge they learn and use with the lab group (in lab meetings) and the field (in conference papers), etc.
…
My own work tends to travel across content types (political advertising, news, prime time TV, PSAs, etc.) and recently has been moving into other platforms from TV (audio only, computer display, video games, etc.) However, my theoretical approach is consistent (limited capacity information processing approach) and my methodology is generally experimental with an emphasis on covert measures of processing.
I'm a cognitive scientist and communication scholar who manages a psychophysiology lab at Texas Tech. I teach courses about the cognitive processing of media messages and research methods.
{ 0 comments… add one now }