The current academic environment of colleges and universities is far from the ivory tower of those days, nor is it the refuge of the author of Stoner.The boundaries between scholars' work and life have been blurred, leading college teachers to frequently abuse themselves not 996 but 007 because they have always been online.
After entering the university at the age of 18, I have spent 27 years at the same university. Through years of study and practice, I have summarized the six dimensions of college young scholars' work and life.I hope that my personal experience will be helpful to young scholars who are new to the field of science, these six dimensions are briefly summarized as follows:
The first dimension is administration.
Once the word is written, it may be repugnant to scholars, because what they hate most is the interference of administrative work with academic research.Many scholars feel that time is not enough in the current academic environment, so they especially hate administrative work, and think that administrative work and formalism can almost be equated. In fact, what I want to talk about here is more about the self-management of scholars.Of course, many scholars are also very disgusted with the word "management", they think "management" means not to work on the front line of scientific research, and the real academic masters are doing scientific research alone.Scholars need to learn to manage, for example, their own laboratories and teams, manage their own time and energy, manage their own research projects and teaching, manage their own funds and resources, manage their own families and health.As a young scholar, if you can't do the above management work well, your whole life may be thrown into a mess or even trapped.
Many scholars envy Newton's or Einstein's research life for being able to concentrate exclusively on the research they enjoy.But today, scientific research, especially engineering research, is increasingly dependent on teamwork, cross-disciplinary innovation, and the power of collaboration (e.g., "gravitational waves" discoveries by thousands of scientists and engineers).Some whimsical, disruptive, general-purpose theories or technological innovations are becoming rarer and rarer.This is why more and more AI innovation in recent years has come from large-scale research teams in the industry.Unless we switch to a new paradigm of scientific research, it will be difficult for us to produce groundbreaking results by ourselves in the current paradigm of technological development.In the current academic environment advocating "Publish or Perish" fierce competition, scientific research has become a high division of labor, different strengths, precision and synergistic long-chain structure.
The importance of management, which I won't go into anymore, is that we must raise awareness of management and make management a top priority in all your work-life balance problems.Many successful people have explored their own management ideas and management experience, and there are many places for us scholars to learn from.Here I recommend books such as 21 Laws of Leadership (John Maxwell), Peter F Drucker, Jim Randel, Greg McKeown, Delayed Satisfaction: How to Get More from Waiting (Mitsutani Jun), and more. These books will inspire you, and then you can slowly manage your own disordered, complex, and out-of-the-box things in combination with your own circumstances, your own conditions, and the nature of your own work.All in all, young academics must be aware of the importance of management, and when you realize it, it's half done.
The second dimension is research (research).
The word "research" has been explained by many scholars, that is, Re+search, which means: constantly searching, and many scholars have introduced it in their blogs.What I want to talk about here is how to do high-level research.We should focus on areas where we can produce some original results.First of all, we need to improve our aesthetic sense, to know what kind of research is high-level research, which I also introduced in the previous blog (Science Network – What Is Awesome Research) - Xu Zhigang's blog (scienceenet).After choosing the direction, we need to focus on one area for a long time.We can conduct several parallel studies at the same time, but at each stage we should choose only one of the most important topics for saturation research, and other studies should only serve as auxiliary research.In the research process, inspiration is very important, be sure to give yourself some free time, use a large amount of free time to think about a problem, sometimes even confused, exhausted.But after a period of intense work, it is easier to generate inspiration during leisure and temporary rest, in fact, this inspiration is due to the early saturation of thinking.
The five years before I became a professor were my happiest and most fulfilling, when I devoted my main energy to research papers, reading, formulating formulas, programming, and discussing into my daily routine.I often get some inspiration when I'm driving, walking, or alone, and when I'm inspired, I rush to the literature and start some discussion.When the research plan is established, arrange the experiment quickly.After the simulation results come out, the discussion and iteration are repeated, and finally a better scientific research result is formed.
The third dimension is teaching.
Teaching is a very important thing for every scholar.Scholars in universities have a natural advantage in teaching.When I visited UC Davis in 2014, my foreign mentor, Professor Michael Zhang, told me that he was very passionate about teaching, and that he believed that teaching well had at least three advantages: 1. Through teaching, we can flip the knowledge in our heads over and over again.When we need to use this knowledge, we can catch it.When we do scientific research, we often superimpose, mix, interweave, and fuse multiple kinds of knowledge to produce a new result. The knowledge, experience, or impression we use when we innovate must be something we've been more familiar with, just like the books we've read and put on the shelf.We must always scan them one by one and get a better impression, such as: Where are these books located?Who is the author of the book?What's in the book?When we use them, we can quickly find them.When we don't use certain knowledge for a long time, they fall asleep, and it's hard for us to motivate them again.Only by constantly scrambling this knowledge can we keep it alive and use it just right.Through teaching, we can inhibit the deterioration of our language expression ability.In particular, English-based teaching can help us maintain a sense of English language and sensitivity to scene applications.If we keep it that way, when we want to express a scientific thing, we can quickly find the most suitable English expression.The teaching process is a process of full communication with students.Whether students can understand is to a large extent positive about the depth and cognitive level of teachers' understanding of knowledge, and good students' questions in the classroom often inspire scientific research.In addition, through teaching, we can pass on our academic views, research habits, thinking methods, and academic style to our students, and through intergenerational renewal, we can inject more fresh blood into our research community.At the same time, teaching is also one of the most effective learning methods, which is what we often hear called Feynman learning, which is to understand a certain knowledge thoroughly by explaining it to others.Finally, I have to say that teaching is still the vocation of university scholars, professors, also known as "Teach" + "Impart", and it is natural to attach importance to teaching itself.
The fourth dimension is social networking.
Many scholars are also extremely disgusted with this.