thesis | grouperlab

February 29, 2016

Filling in the Blanks

How can it be that it’s been nearly 18 months since my last blog entry? Well, I could wax philosophic, and point out that the path to such an outcome is like the path to other, more positive outcomes. It’s an accumulation of daily habits, and a series of perhaps small, but sometimes very distinct, decisions. So, a bit of a review of what’s been happening, and what lessons can be drawn from both the period of silence and what has filled that silence.

I’m a big fan of waiting for a big, dramatic highlight to emphasize in an announcement. Back in November, 2014, I was applying for a campus-level directorship position; I was pretty excited about the opportunity, and the ways that I could use my skills to connect research, and STEM engagement, and educational improvements at K-12 and university levels. I thought I was going to get the position. I didn’t. In retrospect, it’s not necessarily that I was a bad candidate for the job, but a bad match for the view (by others) of what the job needed. This is actually an important distinction, and I am convinced that I had never actually seen the idea of not being selected for a position in that light before. Well, a few weeks of anticipation were followed by days of anger and frustration, which in turned into a more circumspect view of job searches and candidate interviews no longer just being about showing that someone is “good enough” to be considered. Imagine that all of the finalists may be “good enough,” in some generic sense, but every complex job is a combination of factors on a very large vector of possible criteria (utility), where different people involved in the selection (stakeholders) have different ideas of the importance (weights) of the criteria, and decide what “best” looks like (stakeholders maximizing their objective function according to their multi-attribute utility weighting). I was a really good candidate for one version of the job. I wasn’t the best candidate for another version of the job. That doesn’t make me a good or bad candidate overall, and certainly not a bad person. An important lesson to learn, but not one I was ready to write about in Spring 2015.

The lab was going through a significant shift in 2014-15, both conceptually and physically. We spent the first half of calendar 2015 in Wang Hall, learning how to conduct a different type of meeting with a different configuration of students (three new, first year grad students with only four or five continuing students). We’re back in Grissom Hall as of August 2015, but the only thing about the building that’s stayed the same on the inside is the walls and bricks and windows framing the building’s outer boundary. And we’ve had to learn an even more interesting set of dynamics: we are now at a point where much of the lab’s activity officially qualifies as a distributed enterprise. Dissertation-writing students are working in industry, and other doctoral students are doing co-ops, internships, and other work in multiple time zones. Lab meetings and 1:1 individual interactions are more likely to occur in Google Hangouts than Grissom 335 (my new office) or the GROUPER dedicated lab space (which doesn’t exist). So, we have had to learn new lessons about information alignment and distributed knowledge sharing. That’s a topic for another entry, coming soon.

Believe it or not, the lesson learned about being a good candidate vs. a matching candidate for the job had to be taught to me again in 2015. This time, the position was a campus administrative post, and again, I thought I was a very good match for a visionary leadership role in a broadly influential and interdisciplinary approach to the future of the campus. Great, right? Except that this objective function was apparently not aligned with the utility vector of critical stakeholders. This is neither good nor bad, in itself. (Remember what you just told them, Barrett.) I do believe that the transition from anger to acknowledgement happened faster this time, and to be honest, it’s a lesson that does need a very strong reinforcement over multiple administrations for me to actually learn the meaning well.

Oh, there’s some outcome productivity in terms of field visits, and journal papers, and GROUPER degree completions. However, I wouldn’t suggest scheduling MS thesis defenses by multiple students on consecutive days. We succeeded last summer, and now the number of GROUPER MS thesis grads exceeds 30. But I’m not likely to try that again soon—it’s a lot of reading, and a MS thesis is often as much a test and oral exam for the advisor as for the student.

In the end, I’m better off for it, and I think we in the lab have learned a number of very important and valuable lessons. It can be dangerous if someone gets too much in the habit of doing without considering, or acting without accepting that both “success” and “failure” can be a benefit or blessing. One of the challenging, and yet extremely beneficial, outcomes is that the two interviews required me to very explicitly consider the question of how to manage the lab, and in essence, examine what was an appropriate “carrying capacity” of GROUPER at this stage of my career. (I’m probably more active than ever before, with GROUPER work and GROUPERs in 2015 supported by five federal agencies—AHRQ, FAA, NASA, NSF, VA; it’s not yet the “riding into the sunset” that I had previously considered.) We’ve been practicing skills that I see in increasing frequency in industry, but not as much in academia—how to become easy and fluent with a team operating across geography, knowledge domain, and a variety of external constraints to be focused and robust to a variety of communication channel capabilities.

More coming soon. I’m expecting a big announcement in a week or so. No, really.

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January 9, 2014

Who’s Your Team?

(After a recent entry entitled, They Got Game, you might think that this is turning just into a sports blog. I promise: neither that entry nor this one is only, or even primarily, about sports.)

After a glut of sporting festivity, the college football bowl season and first round of NFL playoffs are now history. (Because of the winter storm and “polar vortex” that deposited 10 in / 25 cm of snow, followed by temperatures of -22F / -30C, my satellite receiver has been offline since midday Sunday. Supposedly, there was a fairly entertaining football game on Monday evening. I hope someone enjoyed it.) People who know me know that I’m a fairly intense sports fan, and I have followed both college and professional football (and college women’s basketball) for most of my life. I have also lived in a number of locations and developed attachments to quite a few teams. (I’m going to assume that at least a few current or alumni GROUPERs were pretty pleased with the outcomes of the Rose and Orange Bowls.) So, it’s not surprising when I’m asked, Who’s your team?

This was an interesting philosophical question put to me by a close friend while we were watching one or another of the various games. It became a philosophical question when it was pointed out to me that I was getting more upset at the commentary by the announcers than who was actually winning on the field. It’s understandable to be disappointed when the team you’re rooting for is losing. However, my friend pointed out that I was annoyed even when I wasn’t cheering specifically for one of the two teams playing on the field. Suddenly, I realized that this might not just be about sports. Fortunately, my friend and I prefer very analytical discussions, so we started to analyze it. When I have a team that I feel an affiliation to (I consider them a version of “us”), I want them to win. (If I don’t have an affiliation to the other team, I am perfectly thrilled to have “us” win by a large margin, in what might otherwise be seen as a poor matching of teams.) But more importantly, I want the game to be exciting and entertaining. I want the officiating to be consistent, appropriate, and responsive to the rules as they are currently in place. (Like many fans, I comment about the officiating. However, I also will frequently observe the penalty and announce both the penalty and penalized player, before the referee does so. Did I mention I’ve been an intense fan for a long time?) I don’t like it when the official misses calls. But I will frequently accept that “we” had a bad play instead of always assuming a “bad ref” when a penalty is called against “us”. Why is this? If I want the referees to do their job appropriately (without bias or favoritism), I feel obliged to acknowledge and “own” our errors as well. I respect good announcers who point out important elements of the game play. However, I found myself profoundly upset when an announcer would shift from one bias to another just based on the most recent event, using general references that they’ve heard as “it’s generally known” or “everybody thinks that”… (Using trite catchphrases, especially with wrong or mixed metaphors, will always draw specific ire from me.)

This suggests that there is another level of affiliation going on; this other affiliation applies both to the active participation in research at GROUPER and the spectator role for a football game. It’s not just about sportsmanship, although that’s part of it. Let’s call it the search for The Better Rule, Well Applied (BRWA). As you know, academics have their rankings, the equivalent of the Coaches’ Top 25 poll. The analogy is pretty strong: the rankings for the top US IE graduate programs are voted on by the department heads of those IE programs. So, I can be excited or upset that Purdue is #10. But wait. Let’s look at MIT, ranked #3. I have an affiliation with MIT, so I should see them as “us,” right? They don’t have any degree program called Industrial Engineering. How about Stanford or Cornell? Great universities. But there are more people in human factors in Purdue IE than at the corresponding programs (again, not all IE) in those three universities combined. They don’t do IE human factors. This issue challenges how we might use the rankings. I’m actually less concerned about our actual ranking than the distortion. Hence, this is an issue of BRWA, not just whether we’re better than the (logically nonexistent) competition at a specific other department.

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of students trying to pick their dissertation topics. Some of the topics were exotic; others were relatively mundane. However, I am concerned at how often a topic is considered unworthy because there’s not enough funding in that area. “Well, you need to compete for, and obtain, competitive grant funding. You need to show your colleagues at the highly ranked programs how much money you’re bringing in, and place your students at those programs.” But hold on, my BRWA affiliation screams. The program at XYZ university doesn’t, and won’t, have an opening in human factors. My student would rather work in (and is better suited towards) industry or government than a research academic position. Isn’t graduate training about seeking out creative and innovative solutions that push the frontiers of knowledge and understanding? Isn’t the PhD supposed to be about supporting the student’s career development, more than mine—in other words, preparing them for what suits them, and appropriately emphasizing their strengths towards their best fitting pathway?

Sometimes, it feels like it is playing a different sport. Some football folks talk about “winning at all costs”; others talk about integrity and sportsmanship. They’re supposedly playing the same game, but in reality, they’re not. In sports, and in research, maybe I’m not just playing for “winning”. It feels like I’m playing for Truth. In the lab, what sport are we playing? Which “Game” do we need to bring? My sport seems to be University (knowledge, understanding, career preparation), and I want to be a starter—or even captain—on the special GROUPER squad on the BRWA team. Our team colors include Consent and Connection. …

This may not even be recognizable to other people. It could sound like I’m rooting for the Montana team in the NFL playoffs. (Um, not only is there no professional football team in state of Montana, there is no NFL team in any US state that borders on Montana. Alberta and Saskatchewan have Canadian Football League (CFL) teams. The CFL championship was played last November.) How do you recruit for a team in a sport that others might not even see as the right sport to be playing? Again, this is an interesting philosophical point. For instance, why is the team BRWA, instead of GROUPER? GROUPER can’t answer all questions, about all subjects—we specialize in human factors and systems engineering, and you need more than that to do well in University. These questions aren’t irrelevant to working at Purdue in IE, even if they seem to be ignoring “reality”. If we don’t ask the question, or consider the options, we never make our team or our sport better.

(By the way, the 2013 CFL Grey Cup Most Valuable Player was Kory Sheets, who was a running back for Purdue.)

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September 15, 2013

Eaten up with Curiosity

The motto of all of the mongoose family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-Tikki was a true mongoose.

–Rudyard Kipling

We find ourselves in the midst of a new academic semester, with the variety of challenges that face us in terms of schedules, task demands, and burdens both voluntarily and involuntarily shouldered. In one sense, it is as it always has been; but for each individual, it may be the very first time of an experience that defines and influences the remainder of one’s life. I have been thinking about this with the current configuration of GROUPER, and the need to help students make progress on existing dissertation topics or create new ones. This is not always an easy task, and though I have gone through this process over 50 times (with over 30 MS students and 14 PhD students advised, plus the students whom I have assisted in various less formal ways) on this side of the desk, there are always elements worth learning and improving.

Maybe it is simply the number of times that an issue presents itself within the period of a few weeks that it becomes more salient, and the gap between what is and what could be becomes more evident. Let’s assume that it may be no more than that, although a friend of mine was just mentioning today how there can be periods when one becomes much more open to insight and jumps in one’s self-learning. But there has been something about the question, “What should I do for my research?” that has struck me in very different ways this fall than in the past. I am asking myself different questions about my own research and career pathways; I am reminded of writings and insights from when I first arrived at Purdue. And of course, in the senior project design course, there is always the sense of importance to get the students—so used to textbook problem configurations and well-organized linkages between the information given and the equation to use—to start creating for themselves a system definition and sense of their own active participation in defining the problem to solve as a necessary part of being an engineer. And as an engineer myself, such gaps between what is and what could be are always met in my head with, “What do we do about it?”

And yet, there was something that I couldn’t quite bridge on my own in the conversations with the members of the lab. Where does one go to get ideas? How does one start the organization of facts and methods and tasks that gets one from classroom student to nascent researcher? Over the past month, I began to see that it was not just as simple as a statement in our “1:1 meetings” (as the nearly weekly individual meetings I have with all of members of the lab are known) to go figure out an interesting question. Interestingly enough, this recognition for me comes from a couple of sources, as I am again reminded that I don’t seem to approach the world in a way that is like most of those around me. Apparently, there are graduate seminars taking place in departments around the country (not just engineering departments, but bench sciences, literature, philosophy, sociology…) where students are encouraged and instructed to read through a bunch of journal papers or monographs or book chapters and determine which questions still required further study. (For the record, I took such seminars myself: it’s how I first learned, in 1985 and 1986, of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on cognitive strategies or the cultural specificity of the fundamental attribution error. I loved those papers. I just didn’t define my dissertation that way.)

Benson Snyder, in the 1960s and 1970s, discussed a critical issue affecting higher education, one that has come to be known as “the hidden curriculum”. (The “hidden curriculum” of the book’s title and premise is the informal sociological and socialization process of how and when to learn, not just what to learn.) This book seems to have had a very significant effect on me—not just because I have read through it multiple times (I still own a copy of the 1973 edition of the book), but because I can now see that much of the curriculum I experienced at MIT was shaped in part by the studies Snyder reports of students there 20 years prior. As I am teaching undergraduate statistics again after several years away from teaching it (but never far away from using it), I am also freshly sensitized to the processes of how to learn, and not just what. And this is how I started to recognize some of what I was finding vaguely concerning in the lab.

As an undergrad, one of the most telling philosophies of innovation and excellence I ever heard was one that was directly told to me as to why I had so much latitude in organizing my activities for my work-study job. “I’ve found that it’s best to give good people resources, and then get out of their way.” For me, that was an excellent and empowering approach, since I was never at a loss for ideas or novel approaches or unusual ways of thinking (at least ways deemed unusual by teachers or professors). In fact, I recently came to think about this as something I found exceptionally compelling in a cartoon I saw as an adolescent: Chuck Jones’ animated version of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, narrated by Orson Welles. Rikki is perpetually curious, and fiercely protective, and powerful in ways that are belied by his small size and friendly interactions. But isn’t everyone curious in this way of mongooses? Isn’t everyone driven to “run and find out”? Isn’t that part of the essential “inside” of every researcher?

No, says the hidden curriculum. Students are socialized to learn which questions are the “right” questions, and these questions are “best” defined in an outside-in way. The existing corpus defines the way the field is configured, and thus how new questions should be approached. But wait… 60 years ago, we didn’t have plate tectonics or the cognitive revolution—just working from existing papers published in 1953 wouldn’t have gotten you there, and certainly wouldn’t have gotten you accepted within the “standard” configuration. The same is true with statistical process analysis or scientific project management 100 years ago, or pharmacy or aerodynamics 150 years ago, or electrical and thermodynamic processes 250 years ago. And yet, my learning and research now derives from all of those innovations. Someone has to move beyond the standard, outside-in framework, and be ready to do the new work and meet the new challenges (and face the inevitable questions and criticisms that such an approach will engender).

It’s obvious to me now that it takes a lot more than a brief instruction to a graduate student to think in terms of the problems in the world of task environments, and interacting with people who live in those task environments. (Although an introvert, I find it natural and obvious to talk to someone about the challenges of their work. It’s easier for me than making other types of small talk.) I begin to wonder, though—have I been assuming that, just by osmosis or creating a supportive environment, anyone and everyone will be “eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity,” as Kipling put it? Might they need more help than that?

If you were expecting an answer to these questions… sadly, you will have to wait with me for that. I’ve asked the lab to help me understand what I’m doing that’s different, and how the hidden curriculum has affected and shaped them up to this point (although I didn’t ask it of them quite that way). But at the very least, asking the question is an important part of the process, and an essential element of making progress. There are cobras threatening the bungalow of higher education… bringing in and raising a mongoose is not a bad idea.

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February 11, 2013

Updating Documentation

Now that there are a few new members of the lab, it’s time to pay attention once more to making explicit some of our expectations and shared experiences. It’s interesting to watch, and to test, how stories or catch phrases easily become part of a local culture… only to be met by blank stares when a new person experiences it.

“What’s the best dissertation?” “The one *you* can do in a reasonable amount of time.”

“Is that a title of a song on the album?”

” Delta Pain” (which is a title of a song on the album)

All of these represent elements of tacit knowledge, in that they are shared and understood by people who were in the lab when the event occurred, or maybe in an individual meeting with me, and have learned to experience and internalize the informal lessons of the lab in a particular way. That’s great for an individual mentoring interaction, but not really good for organizing the productivity of getting a population of students to finish high quality thesis and dissertation documents. Thus, we have to do some of these things with more explicit intent, and a more focused and determined documentation of elements of the lab’s culture.

Since the beginning of the Spring 2013 semester, we’ve been working on this in the creation and updating of four distinct documents: A Master’s Thesis outline; a Dissertation prelim outline (oh, even that’s tacit, or at least implicit: the proposal document written in order to describe one’s dissertation so that one can be advanced to candidacy); a Doctoral Dissertation outline… and most recently, a semester-by-semester timeline for progress towards degree completion. These seem to be very helpful for students, and help to summarize and integrate and transmit my experience in a fairly efficient way. And why not? I’ve supervised over 30 MS theses and 12 PhD dissertations, and sat on committees for another 25 or more graduate documents. Most students, on the other hand, only do this once. (I did have one of my students complete a second MS with me after finishing a first one elsewhere; no GROUPERs have ever tried to do multiple PhD dissertations.) Rather than make everything trial and error, or suggest that there is no pattern that leads to increased probability of success, some people (among those are many engineers) would like to have a sense of the path, the rule, the “game plan” of how this graduate experience is supposed to play out.

Does this mean that there is a fixed and rigid procedure that everyone must follow? Of course not, for several reasons. One is that GROUPERs are different people, with different skills. They don’t want to work in the same stream, or using the same data collection or analysis tools, or ask the same sorts of questions. Fortunately, I’ve worked in a bunch of areas, so my tolerance for procedure variability is fairly high–I can advise a variety of dissertations, because I have done a variety of projects in different areas and methodologies. (Some people may think of this concept as akin to Ashby’s discussion of “Requisite Variety”; no strict quantification here is implied.) So, the level of consistency is not at the detailed level of “you must design a three-level, two-dimensional Analysis of Variance studying the influence of…” Everyone is expected to be able to answer, “Why would anyone want to read this thesis / dissertation?” or “Why do we care about the question, or the work you did to answer it?”

It may also be relevant that one of the recent dissertations now making its way to conclusion is specifically addressing the question of procedure reliability and complexity. A very often-repeated task, with few new or challenging elements, can have a standard procedure that is rarely, if ever, inappropriate for completing the task as designed. If you’re developing a brand new task that has never been tried before, it’s highly unlikely that you can write a perfect procedure on exactly how to do it. Most procedures are somewhere in between, even if we assume the procedure is always right. At what level should we expect a new procedure to capture all of the experience that we gain in the development of a new system?

As time goes on, all of these documents will need to be updated–not necessarily because we were wrong, but because our knowledge evolves. (OK, I was explicitly wrong on this item. I forgot to include a version of the well-known advice: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then tell them. Then tell them what you told them.” In other words, the last section of the introduction chapter should include an outline of the organization of the remainder of the thesis / dissertation.) Even the working of the updating process is a helpful way of sharing the experiences and telling the stories of the lab. And when we’re done, current and future generations of GROUPERs can know that I won’t get upset if they haven’t taken 15 credits or completed their plan of study or research proposal by the end of their first semester in the program. Really.

I know, you’re wanting the links to these documents. They’re still under construction. Check back when they’re done and posted.

March 7, 2012

Stream Management

“Hire the best people, and then get out of their way.” — Arnold O. Beckman

While I was an undergraduate, I frequently heard variations of this management philosophy; as an independent-minded student, often working by myself on projects, the mindset was very appealing. However, as a major professor and lab director, things are not always that easy.

Recent updates of the lab webpage have focused on further elaborations of the range of projects (“streams”) that GROUPERs are involved and productive. Instead of just listing the two primary research application areas (healthcare and spaceflight), we’ve now elaborated all three application areas (including STEM education), as well as the three more general methodological / theoretical considerations (communication effectiveness when resources are constrained; the effects of delays and information asynchrony on performance; and processes of knowledge sharing in teams and communities). Why all of the additions? Not just to sound more impressive and recruit more students (with seven grad students, two undergrads, and a 50% administrative appointment, it’s not clear that a much bigger lab is needed or wanted). With the new population of students (see the “Restocking GROUPER” entry), it is almost inevitable that the interests of this collection in 2012 would “load” on the streams differently than the lab circa 2004 or 2008. They even change their allegiance to a particular stream as their understanding of their topic (and their understanding of how the streams are organized) evolves through their development as students and scholars.

So, how does one remain sensitive and aware of these issues? One problem, of course, is that you don’t know what someone doesn’t know, or that you didn’t agree on basic elements, until implicit expectations aren’t met, or unquestioned assumptions aren’t grasped. This seems to show up most frequently, and with the greatest sense of immediacy, when students are in the midst of a critical written milestone (a thesis proposal or dissertation preliminary document, or a thesis or dissertation draft in preparation for a final defense). And with that, I again recognize the challenges of managing a diverse lab that works on novel and bleeding edge problems or approaches. There really isn’t a good way to give someone a past completed thesis and say, “Read this, and do exactly the same sort of thing with the same format, and you’ll be fine.”

In some cases, even that might not be sufficient. After 22 years, a dozen dissertations chaired (and another 20-30 as a committee member), and over 30 theses chaired, it’s easy for me to have the different pictures in my head. Research methods questions? I just go back to my psychology background. Systems engineering definitions? Yes, the style of that is covered, all the way back to my sophomore Unified Engineering experience. But what if your writing style was formed and honed by those with backgrounds in mathematical optimization, or physics, or political science, or software simulation? I’ve experienced all of these from GROUPER students in the past two years… and they’re not the same. Good luck with putting them all into the same box, or worse yet, into a blender and hoping that something palatable comes out. (Suddenly, I cannot help but think about the old “Bass-O-Matic” Saturday Night Live skit.) Yes, it would be much more straightforward to have a single stream and project focus, with all of the students having very similar backgrounds. However, I confess that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.

There is a balance between being too far away, and being too close. Each person, and each group, needs its own balance. So, I’m looking for dynamically stable equilibria in academic research management and educational personal / professional development. Last academic year, I spent a fair amount of my time working with two students both trying to finish their dissertations at the same time. This year, the challenge has been a dissertation, a thesis, and dissertation prelim document, in addition to other research projects. I keep insisting on being directly involved in each project, and each document, and each student—to the extent that I felt guilty and nervous when I mentioned during a lab meeting that I would be gone for a few weeks and unable to keep to the weekly schedules. With this level of commitment, I can be both overwhelmed and concerned when I am not there every moment—exactly the opposite of Beckman’s admonitions. And yet, when I expressed worry that the GROUPERs would be left vulnerable and exposed in the “dangerous jungle and forest” of graduate student life, the response was one of the most rewarding and valuable validations I’ve received in a number of years:

“We’re not in the forest. We’re in the Lab.”

That’s also a philosophy I can live with.

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