Mentors and Markov Chains
Some people have described the minds of graduate school advisors while thinking about their graduate students’ research, as Markov chains. That description is not made audibly by anyone who is still working on their degree and would like to continue doing so, of course. A Markov chain, in essence, is memoryless. What will happen next in a sequence of occurrences is determined by the current set of events and nothing previous.
Professors are like Markov chains in that they will likely forget most of the relevant information concerning your research project that you told them in conversations prior to that point. What was an impressive, well founded research hypothesis on Monday sounds like a tangled fishnet of specious reasoning on Thursday when you don’t take a moment to brief your advisor on what was discussed previously.Now, let’s not be too hard on them. Advisors have a lot to remember so why not make it easy on yours and give some reminders of what they liked about your idea in the first place.
A conversation undertaken assuming memory of all information presented previously is not likely to go well for the student. Discussions with your advisor should always begin with a recanting of previous conclusions arrived upon, information and arguments used to form those conclusion, and reminders of their final decision and how they arrived at it.
Never begin a discussion with your advisor about your research assuming they remember what has transpired previously, unless of course you embarrassed yourself, in which case assume they remember with astonishing clarity. I made this mistake and that is how my dissertation went from containing one experiment, to containing two experiments, going back down to one experiment, and finally back up to two experiments.
My advisor has loved so many of my ideas when I initially presented them, with the buildup of all of the supporting details and theory and the grand hypothesis reveal, only to be nonplussed in a follow up meeting when I skipped straight to the end and he forgot what he liked about the idea in the first place.
Your advisor may not tell you that they don’t remember in exactly what way your brilliance manifested itself in your last conversation so it never hurts to review and hit the high points, else you may find your pet hypothesis on the scrap heap with all the other less-than-fantastic ideas you pitched.
And finally, don’t worry about insulting your mentor’s intelligence; they will usually have no problem letting you know if you are waxing on unnecessarily.
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