About this guide

Hopefully, this guide becomes the collection of opinions form many different people. Below, you can read about the general plan.

This book is focused on (made with the perspective of) technical or computational sciences (so far?) - a field where junior academics are basically advancing along a scientific and technical career path at the same time.

This guide definitely has come controversial takes in it, relative to many other guides. This is by design - there are plenty of other guides you can find, and there’s no need to repeat what’s already known. rkdarst’s position also allows more controversial takes than most people could make. In some fields, organizations, or countries, things are probably much better than is described here. Hopefully, this is an example of the worst case and you can see much better things around you.

Why management?

Once one becomes a leader, one of their responsibility is to get the best out of the people they lead. We often hear horror stories about management, including the joke “the best manager I’ve had is one who did nothing”. Still, working life is difficult, especially in academia, and good management/leadership is actually important both for students and group leaders.

Prologue: Richard Darst

(more prologues will be added for other contributors)

If I’ve decided to write all this, maybe I should say why I think anyone should even bother reading what I’m writing, right?

When I started as a manager, not of research students but of research staff, I put some thought into understanding what my responsibilities would be. What I found wasn’t very pretty: most researchers/students I knew didn’t have very good managers, I had good supervisors but perhaps not good managers, and the whole idea of academic management was vague and unclear. This leads to catastrophically low productivity and research output.

Of course, this might be by design: do we want our students and staff to have the freedom to do what they want and try and fail? Yes, that seems like a good idea. But that doesn’t mean they have to be alone and without good mentoring. And if we don’t put in effort in advising, the outcome of the academic system only reenforces existing power structures and inequalities in academia. The mental health effects of “try and fail” are everywhere and a major crisis.

I’m not a research group leader (professor), but I think that is a good thing. Instead, I work as professional university staff (scientific computing support) and am young enough to still be closely connected to junior researchers. In my role as a supporter, I see (and help with) many of the problems that should be solved at the group management level, whether they are technical or social. Since I have started supervising my own staff, I can connect to best practices of independent research-type staff. On top of that, as busy as I am, I have more time than most group leaders to devote to writing this. I won’t know everything, but it’s open source so others can improve.

I’m convinced that there is a lot that needs to be better. Probably, few people will read this, I’m fully aware that the people who most need to hear these points probably don’t want to (and won’t find this). Everyone will need to find their own style, but by writing down some notes hopefully everyone can be helped to find it. Equally, by writing things down, students and research staff can also benefit by being able to understand different management styles and discuss what they need with their own advisors (or find a properly matched advisor in the first place).

How it is made

Current status

This is very much a work in progress and nothing is complete or proofread.

Credits

The book The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier served as inspiration for this guide. In fact, you could go so far as to say that most of the basic ideas of this guide come from here, with added commentary and interpretation for the academic setting.

The credits page will list contributors who wish to be mentioned.