Ever since I decided to get myself involved in academic research two years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the habits and behaviours of the different researchers I’ve interacted with. Most researchers are crazy, but they’re crazy in different ways because their actions are driven by different forces.

Understanding your particular brand of influences and craziness as a researcher and comparing it with those of others may help you to understand why your collaborations with some researchers work very well and why others drive you insane. Therefore, I hereby present to you the “Researcher Alignment Matrix”.

I recently decided I wanted try presenting my work at an academic conference, so I had to write and submit an abstract for my proposed presentation. The problem, of course, was that I had no idea how to write a scientific abstract, which was a bit of a problem. Most of the advice I received and could find online was too vague for my taste, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and deconstruct some abstracts to see how those authors did it. And I’m really glad I did, because it was very enlightening.

I think the best thing to do as an undergrad at a conference is to be observant, since it’s pretty low-stakes at that point. Part of doing this is to see how academics interact to see whether or not you want to do this. What do people wear, how do they speak, what do they talk about, etc.

1. If you can, ask questions of the speakers after talks! Asking good questions during sessions is powerful (it gets you noticed!)¹

2. There seems to be a rough heuristic that you have to be a decent-ish speaker to become a professor.² (Virtually all of the professors I listened to were strong speakers; the grad students and post docs were a mixed bag.)

3. If you can, introduce yourself to people and join conversations; try to fully be a participant.

For context, these are some things I learned in the process of putting together and delivering a guest lecture to a first-year discrete math course last summer. The talk was about the research I was doing at the time, and I was allotted about half an hour for the presentation. Again, I meant to write and post this last year, but clearly that didn’t happen.

I really meant to put this list up sometime last fall… whoops. (This is yet another incredibly overdue article.) Anyway, here are a whole bunch of things I learned while attempting to “do research” last summer, whatever that means. The big theme here is to make life easier for future you, who will have to wrangle together your several months of chaos and exploration into a rigorous and coherent narrative. Present you can help by being organized and breaking things down into smaller, documentable steps.