Intentional Traces Collective
Research Group Guide
This is a living document. It took me 7 years of being faculty to feel like I knew enough to write some things down. I likely have missed some things and will continue to learn and update.
Learning Objectives and Corresponding Supports
Boundaries, Vacation, and Time Away
A few concluding thoughts on academic culture
By the end of your PhD, you will... | (Some) structural supports |
Have a broad knowledge of Human Centered Design & Engineering, including theory and methods | Courses, seminars, research group meetings, the theory and methods portion of your general exam, your dissertation & other research |
Have a deep knowledge in a field / concentration | Elective courses, the concentration portion of your general exam, your dissertation & other research |
Develop answerable & valuable original research questions | Courses, your prelim, your general exam, your dissertation & other research, grant & fellowship writing |
Apply human-centered methods to answer research questions | Methods courses, your prelim, the methods portion of your general exam, your dissertation & other research, lab/research group meetings |
Weigh ethical considerations related to design & engineering and advocate for ethical courses of action | Courses, your general exam, your dissertation and other research, seminars |
Clearly and effectively communicate the value and importance of proposed and completed research | Grant / fellowship writing, HCDE 541, HCDE 547, research group meetings, talks and practice talks |
Teach practice and research knowledge and methods to audiences of researchers and practitioners | Mentoring directed research groups, TAing, talks and practice talks |
Demonstrate scholarly care across all phases of research | Methods courses, reading groups and lab meetings, feedback from me and peers |
Note: This is written from an HCDE perspective. If you are in CSE or the iSchool, substitute as appropriate.
Each quarter, we will collaborate on making and updating an individual development plan, as well as reviewing your previous one, to tailor these goals, supports, and actions to you and your quarter.
In my work, I do a mix of research (typically 40%), teaching (typically 40%), and service (typically 20%).
Research. I spend most of my research effort on raising resources (which includes generating research ideas and writing proposals), mentoring students and other collaborators, and – for some projects – project management. I also make time to read current literature or learn about it at conferences. At this stage in my career, it is rare for me to have direct time to spend on conducting research (e.g., programming, designing, analyzing, conducting interviews), though it occasionally happens.
Excellence in research typically requires multiple rounds of feedback and iteration, and I will closely read and provide detailed feedback on study materials. As you become more senior and experienced, the detail of that feedback or the amount that I will revise myself (versus provide comments on) may decrease. I also take our shared responsibility for the content of publications seriously, and it is imperative that you give me and other coauthors ample time for feedback on drafts before they are submitted.
Through 2028, I am also codirecting the UW ALACRITY Center. This is a large scale initiative that involves supporting a range of staff and investigators on center projects, and that substantially shapes how I spend my research time.
Teaching. In HCDE, tenure-track/tenured faculty typically teach three courses a year. We have the option to replace teaching a course with research (if grant funds can support it) or significant internal service, and very rarely may replace two courses in this way. I love the opportunities teaching provides to provide instructional and mentorship experiences to students who are the future of our field. Teaching also advances my thinking and helps keep me current with contemporary practices in industry and new research.
Service. Universities and academic communities are what we make them, and I believe that high-quality service is important for making UW a place I want to do my work and in which you can thrive, and I believe the same of our academic communities.
Within UW, my service consists of recurrent tasks like participating in faculty meetings and recruitment and review of applicants. I am typically on department committees and other committees in the college or university as needed. Some additional, significant current responsibilities:
Outside of the university, I contribute through reviewing papers and serving on program committees. Because many of my current UW service commitments have specific time constraints, I have recently focused more on reviewing rather than program committee commitments. I also am on the ACM SIGCHI Dissertation Award Committee (tentatively through 2026) and, with great colleagues around the world, am working to launch an ACM SIGCHI conference at the intersection of Health and HCI: Interactive Health.
Over the duration of a PhD, most students engage in a similar breath of activities – possibly even more. However, that breadth may change over time, with some quarters or years being more focused:
These times vary. A student with significant prior research experience or many course requirements satisfied through a prior masters might set a goal of graduating in four years. Some approaches may make a six year plan a better match for others. Additionally, the job market and career goals can also influence timelines.
How you are funded will affect how you spend your time each quarter. HCDE students are primarily funded through teaching assistantships, research assistantships, and fellowships. Most students move through several of these, sometimes simultaneously, and the work itself often looks similar across them. The differences lie in what's being asked of you and what you can count on from the lab and from me.
Teaching assistantships are the core of the HCDE Funding Guarantee, and are 220-hour / quarter appointments in which you may be leading a course or section of a course, or contributing to a course instructed by someone else. These positions can be incredibly fulfilling, and many doctoral students value making a difference in student learning. A TA is a formal employment relationship, governed by the UW ASE contract, with the pay, benefits, and working conditions that entails. Your dissertation work during a TA quarter proceeds separately, as academic credit.
Research assistantships are also typically 220-hour/quarter appointments under the same contract. These are funded by grants, which come with expectations about the research that will be done, where it will be communicated, and on what timeline. When you are on an RA, you will have a supervisor — who may or may not be me — working toward specific grant deliverables. During an RAship, you may also be registered for academic credit to support progress toward your degree. In many cases, the RA work will align with your dissertation research, and this can support rapid progress toward your dissertation. When it does align, it helps to have an explicit conversation about what work the grant requires versus what you are doing as a student advancing your own research. Whether an RA is close to your dissertation or further from it, it can be an opportunity for engaged mentorship and development as a researcher.
Academic credit — dissertation credits, directed research credits, or similar — is the record of your research work outside of an RAship, including during TA quarters. This is also a real commitment on both sides. I am actively advising and supporting your progress, and you are doing the intellectual work, and day-to-day activities, of your research. The expectations are different from an employment relationship — more self-directed, less deliverable-driven — but no less real. See my expectations on registering for HCDE 600 or HCDE 800 credit with me.
Fellowships and grants you write yourself introduce a different kind of blurring. A fellowship supporting your dissertation — an NSF GRFP, a graduate school fellowship, or a dissertation grant — funds you to pursue your own research agenda with fewer directed deliverables and more latitude to follow your intellectual interests. Some of these funds will result in the university setting up an RAship for you, even though they are oriented around your goals. If you write a grant with me as co-investigator, that work will come with shared deliverables and a formal role for each of us. A fellowship or a grant may or may not include funds to pay for the time we spending engaging in the research (e.g., an RA quarter or hourly summer support for you, salary support for me). Either way, we should be explicit upfront about what the funding expects of each of us and what happens if the timeline or scope needs to shift. I will try to make those expectations clear when we work on applications together, and I encourage you to ask.
You may also find yourself working on your research when you are neither funded nor registered: continuing some work during an internship, responding to revisions on a paper, or wrapping up fieldwork outside of an academic quarter. If you are also employed somewhere doing related work, questions about intellectual independence and ownership of ideas can arise, and those are worth talking through early.
If something about a funding arrangement seems unclear, say so early. These conversations are much easier before the appointment or work begins than after.
Directness. I value direct communication, and that will often be challenging communication (for each of us), because challenge is necessary for our growth and learning. I strive to communicate that challenge with corresponding supports.
Predictability. I strive to make it as easy as possible for you to anticipate what kinds of support you can and cannot expect from me and when. This includes communicating boundaries on my expertise and availability.
There are times when that predictability breaks down. As I become more senior, my roles increasingly have direct responsibilities to others, including providing support in urgent or unpredictable situations. I do my best to to insulate you from that unpredictability, but there may be times when I cannot. On your end, you are learning to do new things and it can be hard to predict how long something will take or when a draft will be ready. Either of us can also have unplanned life events that need to take priority.
When things become unpredictable, it is important that we communicate. Sometimes I may be able to adjust when we plan to meet, read for feedback. At other times, I may have less flexibility and we should just take advantage of the opportunity for me to give feedback on what you have. In other situations, we may need to adjust our goals, such as extending a project timeline.
Engaging with feedback. One of the primary supports for your learning as a doctoral student, especially once past courses, is through feedback from me, your committee, and your peers and other colleagues. I strive to give thorough, detailed feedback, both in writing and in meetings, and this requires time. That means I need time to read things, and if you miss an internal deadline, it may be difficult for me to adjust in timely way. I also expect that you will engage with this feedback–yourself, and in depth–or you are skipping a key support for your learning.
My feedback on drafts may include comments on your strengths as a scholar and areas for growth, high-level research framing, and detailed writing notes. Even when I am reading for high level feedback, I may point out lower level concerns in an effort to make the next iteration stronger – while I try to separate these, if you are ever unsure about whether something is a high level concern or something smaller, or if something is a major concern or just a tip, please ask.
Email: I’m decently responsive on email, but I triage pretty aggressively. If something has a deadline, putting it in the subject is helpful. If something requires a response, making that clear from skimming it helps, otherwise I may treat it as an FYI. If you think I’ve missed something, don’t be shy about emailing again.
Slack: Sign up for the DUB Slack workspace (ask me if you need an invite), and, if an HCDE student, the HCDE one (also ask me if you need an invite). On the DUB workspace, make sure I add you to the #intentional-traces-collective and #intentional-traces-collective-current channels. General announcements go there, along with a pinned document with my travel / major conflict schedule.
I’m okay at Slack private messages. Please try to use Slack for conversational things and not for documents/attachments you want me to review or to do items – emails are much easier to add to my to do list than requests on Slack. If you send me a Slack message, I may read it on a commute and then forget about it entirely.
In person ad-hoc conversation or phone call: If we are getting into a back and forth via email, it’s usually more effective for us to find a few minutes to talk in lab, on the way to or from a talk we’re both going to, or by phone/Zoom.
Shared calendar. All advisees have access to my detailed shared calendar. You should use this to schedule ad-hoc meetings as needed or to adjust when other events come up (e.g., a medical appointment). This is to avoid scheduling back and forth.
Website: You should have a website that contains, at a minimum, a brief statement of your research and publications. This helps me point people to something when opportunities come along.
Social media: Some people make good use of social media to promote their work and engage with broad research communities. Social media can also be a toxic wasteland and many platforms are filled with dark patterns designed to erode your intentionality; you should not feel pressure to participate.
Taking into account potential or perceived power asymmetries, I generally don’t initiate friending students on social media, but you are welcome to.
In a typical week, I have about 25-30 hours of meetings, not counting teaching. This can mean that in a teaching quarter, I have up to 35 hours per week already scheduled. Consequently, I am cautious about scheduling more meetings. I am also happy to cancel them when not needed.
I typically meet with each advisee weekly for 25 minutes. For co-advised students, if the schedule works, I prefer to meet together to keep us all on the same page and avoid us repeating ourselves. There may be some quarters when that is impractical (e.g., conflicting schedules) or when you prefer to meet separately for more divergent feedback, in which case, I would prefer checking in together at least monthly.
While I am usually happy to cancel other meetings, I prefer not to cancel advising meetings. It’s good to at least briefly check in.
Making the most of these meetings. To make the most of advising meetings, please bring an agenda (many students link the agenda from the calendar invite). We will typically start each meeting with our key goals so that we can prioritize how we spend our time, and then move on to a genera update and review progress and roadblocks. For roadblocks, we may work through them together or identify other experts or resources that can help address them. By the end of the meeting, we will set specific goals for the next week and review our respective items.
In meetings, we can review study ideas, detailed study plans or materials (especially if you bring in specific questions), designs or prototypes, and outlines of papers or talks. It is generally not helpful for me to use meeting times to review paper drafts.
At least once a quarter, we should make a point of using a meeting to focus on your long-term growth and career goals. It is easy for these longer-term priorities to get crowded out in day to day conversations about projects and manuscripts, and it’s important for us to make time to center them. This should typically be our first meeting of the quarter and organized around your individual development plan; if there are urgent deadlines the first week, we might defer a week.
Calendar invites. Please send calendar invites, and please keep them updated with changes (e.g., location, changes in schedule). Especially for co-advising meetings, it’s better for you (the student) to own the invite: if an adviser declines because of travel or a conflict, you know who to expect. If you cancel because of your own travel, then there usually isn’t much point in your advisers meeting.
Format. I generally expect these meetings to be in person – I have a number of remote meetings with people in different campuses and much of my work is screen-based (writing, email), so making advising meetings also screen-based does not work for me. There may be times when remote meetings are needed (e.g., certain co-advising situations; travel; otherwise impractical logistics), but this cannot be a long-term default for me. I may also need to take some remote meetings as voice only.
Scheduling additional meetings. There will be weeks when 25 minutes is not enough or when we find it is beneficial to split advising and project meetings (see below). I make my calendar available so you can just schedule an additional meeting.
There may be times when we need to a schedule a regular project meeting, especially if it involves multiple students or faculty who are not your advisers. For these, it is important to have an agenda. In weeks where there is not a set agenda, it can make sense to cancel or turn it into a co-working session.
There may also be other times when we need to schedule an ad-hoc meeting for a project. As an advisee, you’ll have full access to my calendar and can do that. However, you might also consider whether would be more useful to bring your work into a research group meeting for group discussion and feedback (see below).
It is important that you have a regular meeting in which you participate. These help you build community with peers and awareness of research topics and methods that are not yours in a way that reading papers does not facilitate. The feedback you give makes their work stronger, while feedback you receive makes your work stronger, and you see connections to the field beyond your specific projects.
We currently hold weekly research group meetings, joint with Julie Kientz’s CHILL lab. The agenda vary between a between a longer presentation or discussion and individually sharing out responses to three prompts: (a) what’s new? (b) what are you working on this week?, and (c) what could you use some help or support on from the lab this week?
I cannot effectively advise students who are not connecting with others’ research on a regular basis: without those meetings, you will learn more slowly without engaging in others’ work and receiving feedback on your own, you will feel more alone in the barriers you face, and you will rely too much on me to make the connections between your work and the rest of the field or fields. Consequently, if I am advising you, I expect you to attend these meetings unless there is a scheduling conflict (e.g., a course that unfortunately overlaps for a quarter, time off, travel, illness). One exception: for students who are co-advised, you may have the option of multiple research group meetings – more than you need. In that case, you might choose not to attend every research group meeting, but you should have a structure that puts in you connection with others’ research at least every other week.
As above, please manage calendar invites (accepts/declines) so that I and others in the research group can plan appropriately.
I’m also happy to organize quarter-long reading groups with a few students, when there’s a topic of interest. I started doing these in 2018, and I’ve found them to be great for creating space to learn about a topic, talk about it with each other, and begin thinking about what it might mean in our own research.
For research meetings you join, you should attend regularly and generously give feedback; please don’t show up only when you want input on your own work. (If you do this, I will gently remind you; if you persist at doing this, you will need to find different advising.)
In addition to lab meetings, I encourage you to attend at least one weekly seminar or research group. These help you engage with research ideas and methods that may be different from what your immediate peers and I are doing. Some options:
Especially once you get past courses, more of the responsibility for structuring your time and energy–in your studies and other aspects of life–falls to you. It is important that you attend to this, or it’s really easy to feel unproductive and stuck (even when you are not!) or to feel productive (even when you are spinning your wheels).
There’s also no single solution for everyone. The one practice that has the most support for it is to establish a daily writing practice, in which, on all work days, you write for at least 30 minutes a day. Writing can take many forms: editing, free writing, notes, and even discussing a project with a colleague. Successful researchers structure their time in ways that protect time for this: for many, that is at the start of the day, for others, it is in evenings; others may have it vary by day of the week.
You have to learn what works for you. I do best when I have a couple of mornings per week when I sit down and write or read before coming into campus, though even then it’s tough to avoid getting pulled into emails. Scheduling meetings with yourself to make progress on tedious tasks or longer-term tasks that can get crowded out by the urgent is important. When I was a PhD student, I learned that a totally unstructured semester is bad news for me (it helps me to have some teaching or scheduled service commitments); as a faculty member, I’ve learned that having an overly scheduled week with no space to react to new ideas or thoughts makes me irritable and stressed.
I also discourage long hours and, especially, all-nighters. They aren’t sustainable, they harm you, and they harm the work. Occasionally we all misjudge how long something will take and may decide it’s worth a late night to finish it, but if you find yourself doing this repeatedly, we should discuss how many things you are taking on and how you are planning your time to complete them.
Finally, compared to research, service and teaching often provide more immediate feedback (positive or negative), from people and communities you care about. This can be addicting and expand to fill all available time. Take steps to prevent these from crowding out work that seems less urgent or that has less immediate feedback.
Presence in the lab and on campus creates opportunities for informal, spontaneous interactions with other students and faculty. You can share knowledge, build awareness, ask for quick help, and give quick help. On the other hand, open plan offices are not the best space for all kinds of work and there are individual differences in what works.
My general advice/expectation is that you find at least 10-16 hours / week to be in the lab. Below that, student awareness of each other starts to suffer. If you find you are most productive with more time in the lab, awesome. If you are more productive spending most of the rest of your time in a coffee shop or at home, that’s also fine.
As a doctoral student at a large university, you will be presented with many more opportunities than you can or should reasonably pursue at a time. That, combined with the freedom to pursue topics that are important and about which you may care deeply, creates some weird pressures. I often describe it as a weird hybrid of a hobby and career: some people go home and want to work on a hobby, I often go home and want to work on research.
You’ll need to say no to some (many) opportunities. That’s hard. Be realistic about how much time you have, and be aware of optimism bias and thinking you will have more time in the future. Reward yourself for saying no to things you wanted to say yes to (the Olsons, I believe, bought themselves a bottle of champagne to enjoy every time they said no to something they really wanted to do). My second year, I found it helpful to create a shadow calendar of things I said no to, and then enjoy that I was not doing them when the time came around (sort of anti-FOMO).
If you are presented with an opportunity that you aren’t sure about, you should not feel pressured to decide right away. You can ask for time to think about it or to ask your mentors; I still do this.
Take some time to get to know how many projects/activities are right for you. As one data point, I did best as a PhD student when I had about three active projects: one in the more creative, divergent stage, one in the execution stage (interviews, analysis), and one in the writing stage. Each of those felt, to me, like the came from a different “bucket” of energy, so when I didn’t feel like writing (for example), there was something else to work on.
Some people roll their eyes about service, but it’s an important part of how the university and the community work, and it can also be fulfilling. As you spend time in the community, I encourage you to take on some service including:
I encourage you to be intentional about that service. What communities do you most care about supporting with your limited time? You might, for example, decline reviews for venues in which you do not publish and in communities to which you do not (and do not want to) belong, while volunteering for reviews for communities to which you consider your home.
You may also develop funding proposals, in the form of grants (which typically support specific research) and fellowships (which typically support you as an individual). This is a different skill than paper writing, and it gives you practice telling your story, seeing how different research arguments might resonate, and planning research. This funding can accelerate your progress toward your degree, deepen your research, and, sometimes, provide more research independence.
Grants can be large or small. Small grants might support the expenses of running a study: recruiting participants, traveling to field sites, study materials, and perhaps conference travel. Larger grants may support your time, in the form of RA quarters, or the time of several researchers, including faculty and other students. As you develop your research agenda, you may work with peers, me, and other faculty to write long-term grant; if you are interested in this, ask! I will also try to suggest it when I notice opportunities. Grants are worth pursuing when they support work we want to do; be cautious of proposals that pull your research in a direction you wouldn't otherwise go or that commit us to added work beyond what they fund.
Generally, students find it valuable to apply for fellowships for which you are eligible, even if the odds are low. That said, if it’s a lot of work for not a lot of money, then save yourself (& your letter writers) the time. Also, don’t take money from organizations with which you don’t want to be associated.
When should you do an internship? (1) If you want to explore what it’s like to work in a particular company, role, or setting, (2) if you want to develop a skill for which someone in industry is the right mentor, and/or (3) you want access to a research site. Additionally, an internship can result in earnings that help you out during the rest of the year, which can be valuable.
Early in your degree (first 2-3 summers), more exploratory internships can be useful for helping you set a direction. Later, more focused internships that support your dissertation -- rather than derail your momentum -- tend to be valuable.
A PhD is long. I encourage you to take vacations–whether you travel or stay at home–that give you time to become refreshed. For me, I generally find that to truly disengage from the work, that takes about a week away (though I can disengage faster if I go somewhere without Internet), and I take 3-4 weeks of vacation per year.
I also encourage you to set boundaries around the PhD and related work. One of the challenges of the freedom to work on what you care about most, with great colleagues, is that it can expand to fill all available time. While I think the right boundaries vary from person to person, I believe you absolutely must set some for your own wellbeing. As one data point, I (a) don’t commit to scheduled work on weekends, with limited exceptions for travel and outreach events, (b) commit to a maximum number of evenings of scheduled work (two nights/week when I’m teaching in the masters program, one/week during other parts of the academic year, and zero in the summer).
Please let collaborators know when you’ll be unavailable (both on a day-to-day basis and extended absences), and have a plan for any ongoing studies.
See the department website for overall process, I only include my general advice here. This portion is particularly HCDE-specific. Neither the department nor I regard milestones as a “weed out” process (there are better opportunities to evaluate in partnership with your mentors and advisers, as you go along, whether a PhD is still consistent with your goals); I tend to view each milestone as a chance to engage an audience in your progress and your work.
Before going into the milestones, there’s a norm that has developed in academia of providing food at milestones. (I blame the stress bakers; I was one.) In HCDE, our policy is that students do not provide food at milestones. If you must stress-bake, please save it for your labmates and/or your friends. The department will provide light refreshments for your defense.
For all milestones, they contain written and oral components. I have noticed that increased use of LLMs and writing assistance tools–especially at inappropriate steps in the research and writing process–can result in documents that seem plausible, and the gaps in the student’s knowledge of the literature, the methods used, or of their data become painfully apparent only during the defense. You should ask yourself: am I prepared to answer in-depth questions about this work?
I wish I could tell you that there’s an optimal way to manage your first year as a doctoral student, but everyone’s needs and paths are so different. So, instead, a few considerations:
Do you want to go your own direction? If you are very set in your topic, you might craft your rotations to help explore advising matches related to that topic, or you might plan a project that is more continuous across quarters. Even in that case, I encourage you to be open to experiences that change your direction. You may also want to pick a quarter (or two!) to work with a senior student on their directed research group on a topic of interest (even if it is a tangent from your own) to gain mentorship and become more integrated with the research group.
Do you want to learn by apprenticeship & explore multiple topics? If so, we might think about rotations in which you work with a senior doctoral student (where senior can just be n>1 year) on a piece of their project. This can help you rapidly explore several topics, with mentorship and support. It also can mean that there’s someone (the senior PhD student) to lead the project to completion even after your rotation is over, which can be good for finishing the work without accumulating a new partially finished project with each rotation quarter.
Rotation mentorship. As a rotation mentor, I find it tricky and somewhat awkward to balance between supporting you and giving you space to figure out what topics and advising team are right for you after the first year. I’m happy to meet with you weekly (or every other week) throughout the year if you are scheduled to rotate with me in a quarter, and meeting some before you start your rotation can help you hit the ground running. This is regardless of your long term advising plan–I’m committed to helping admitted students succeed and to connect with the research group, but until we talk about it and you have me sign a form, I don’t make any assumptions about advising. I generally let you lead that conversation when you are ready.
One of the dilemmas students face in the prelim is whether to present something they have completed, even if it was before you joined HCDE or not your main work, versus something newer. Presenting completed work is a legitimate choice and often the most comfortable one; you know how it worked out and may have presented it before. That said, if you have in-progress work, with at least partial or preliminary results, that is closer to your developing research interests, you will gain more from presenting that. It helps you get comfortable talking about a topic important to you and it helps the community get to know this work. Students present everything from study designs to lit reviews to completed studies; all have been appropriate and received constructive feedback.
There’s no perfect time to complete your generals. If you have explored many different topics in your first year or two, you might find that you are not ready to make the most of the general exam until late in your third year or early in your fourth year. If you found your core interests early, and especially if you had substantial prior research experience, any time in your third year might work.
I encourage you, though, to take your generals early enough that they do not become a mini dissertation proposal. In my time as a student and as a faculty member, the most productive, intellectually stimulating general exams have been those that are divergent and generative: they help understand the space of possibility for your dissertation, future work, and a field more broadly.
In contrast to the general exam, the proposal is mostly convergent. Your goal is to emerge with a concrete plan of action for the remaining work to graduate, with feedback from your committee and a commitment that, yes, if you do this work, you will graduate.
As an additional important, but often unarticulated, goal, you should also use the proposal to gain practice and experience with telling the story of your research. Proposals often occur shortly before you go on the job market, and it’s a chance for you to see how an audience will react to the contributions you are claiming and receive feedback from your committee and the public audience.
One note about proposals and defenses: they are are an interesting mix of celebratory (about your work, about your progress a da student, and hopefully passing the milestone). However, they are also exams, and you will receive challenging questions that are intended to support your development and the research and to which you do not yet know the answer. If you have family or friends attending, you may wish to prepare them for that expectation!
We will work to manage your defense to have as few surprises as possible; there are rarely good surprises at a defense. You can help with this by keeping your committee informed and engaged about any deviations from the proposal, scheduling early, and getting your draft to your reading committee early.
Though not a “milestone” exactly, I want to comment briefly on the annual review process. This is a chance for you to step back and reflect on your progress, what’s working, and what could be working better. It is also an opportunity for you–and me–to enlist the broader support of HCDE (or CSE) faculty toward your goals. You should use this as an honest accounting of your progress, not just a list of activities. Naming a problem or a challenge is not a sign of failure; it shows self-awareness and can catalyze specific support or suggestions. Students who engage, write detailed responses, and ask specific questions get better support toward their next year and long term goals. In contrast, students who treat it as a perfunctory box to check and write high-level, vague responses raise faculty concerns while simultaneously not giving any specific inroads to address those concerns.
Requirements, Grades: At times, I will say that grades don’t matter. Please don’t misunderstand that as me saying that learning or courses do not matter. We have course requirements that are intended to further your development and learning. If you are convinced a required course is not going to be worth your time, please talk with me–if we agree, we might find a substitute, which I’d much prefer over you wasting your time. That said, you may find that you satisfice on some course assignments to protect time for research and other priorities. It is okay to ask me for advice on what to satisfice or not.
Electives: Finding electives in UW is hard, especially because barriers to getting into a course are not always transparent (and, even once known, are not always navigable). Your peers are one of the best resources, along with the electives folder in the HCDE PhD Resources student drive. In general, courses marketed as Professional and Continuing Education will be harder to get into than state-funded courses. If you don’t meet the prereqs, you might also ask the instructor for a meeting to see if they have suggestions of alternates (and, based on how that goes, they may even decide they can find a seat for a motivated student from outside their program).
This section merits its own guide, both on the writing process and some common issues in academic writing. But, I will again endorse having a daily (on work days) writing practice.
Conferences are an important part of getting to know the larger community, and for getting the community to know you. By the end of your degree, it is typically good to have a “home conference”–smaller and more focused than CHI–that you identify with. This has a benefit of helping orient your work and your service to a subfield: a community where you are known, where you know the work, and where you know the genres of contributing. For me, CSCW is my home, though I also find Ubicomp to be important for my work. You may have to try several communities before finding your home or homes.
Before you go to a new conference, it can help to brainstorm a list of attendees/potential attendees you would like to meet. If I’m going, I can then help be on the lookout for a time to introduce you; if I’m not, another UW/HCDE faculty member may be able to help.
You don’t have to go to every session; that can be long and exhausting. Planning some time when you might go for a walk or have a long hallway conversation with a colleague can be more valuable than seeing another three talks about papers you are eventually going to read anyway.
You also don’t have to participate in every social opportunity at conferences. Know yourself and what you need to be well and to be your best (and know that this may take some trial and error). Also, many conference receptions (formal or informal) can still be too alcohol-centric. You should not feel any pressure to drink to participate. If you ever want a buddy to organize a group to do something else, please ask me or another member of the lab.
Conferences are work trips and you should not have to pay out of pocket to participate. Unfortunately, conference travel is often expensive. The program and I are committed to helping you attend, though within our constraints. Please neither assume that there is funding to send you nor that there isn’t funding to send you–ask! Some things you can do to help:
I also appreciate when you organize to share lodging, but please don’t compromise on lodging or logistics so much that it undermines your ability to participate in the conference. If a health situation means that we need to pay a bit more for you to fully participate (e.g., a private room, or a room closer to the conference), please let me know. If you find that you are having to compromise too much on logistics to participate in the conference, talk with me and we can work to find solutions or consider whether another conference would be better: there are some conferences I skip attending because the benefit to cost ratio is just not good enough.
I prefer to reimburse for actual meal costs rather than per diem amounts as the small savings adds up across students. Some of our conferences are in nice places, and it can be great to take advantage of that–but meals need to be within per diem limits. As an overall guiding principle, the majority of our travel is paid by taxpayers–through grants or through other public budgets–and donors; in addition to following university travel policies, we should spend in a way that we would feel comfortable justifying to a taxpayer or donor.
If you have questions about travel expenses or reimbursement, reach out to me, the HCDE fiscal team, or Engineering Shared Services before you spend whenever possible. This can help with making sure you have the right documentation for speedy reimbursement.
There are many things that can support your research, e.g., transcription, buying a book so you can take notes in it or not worry about availability at the library, participant incentives, parking or expenses related to doing the work. I can often (but not always) pay for this out of a discretionary budget or grant budget, so if something would make your work easier, please talk with me before spending money and we’ll see what we can do.
Reimbursement. For purchases and travel, HCDE’s fiscal office is generally great at speedy reimbursement: if you submit the reimbursement request promptly, the money is typically in your bank account before your credit card payment is due (so, rather than you making the university an interest-free loan, the university is essentially making you an advance). There are some exceptions where you incur the expense well before you can get reimbursed. If reimbursement ever creates a barrier for you, do not assume you have to deal with it on your own: staff may be able to purchase on a university purchasing card, or I may be able to purchase and get reimbursed instead. Talk with me or the fiscal office.
Beware of, and fight back against, simple quantification of research. People often quantify research (dollars raised, papers published, papers submitted, first authored papers submitted, citation counts, and so on) as a shorthand for measuring impact or productivity or as a way to compare people. I understand the value of having comparable metrics, but often these measures are used to compare unlike ways of contributing. I am also concerned that over-quantification has created an arms race in paper counts on CVs by the time people graduate and that it can be used as a lazy shorthand for assessing an applicant or a tenure case rather than really engaging with the research.
To promote engagement with actual substance of research, I support recommendations like evaluating hiring and promotion candidates based on a limited number of publications (see this CRA best practices memo). I also encourage us to live that in our day-to-day conversations. Rather than asking someone how many papers they are submitting, ask what they are working on or most excited to be submitting.
Relatedly, on social media oriented professionally and broadly, I suggest that we post about paper acceptances once we can share a link to a pre-print that someone can read and engage with. That said, publication is a big milestone for a project, so do pause to celebrate.
Beware of social comparison. Feedback in research is often slow and often indirect. You may wait months to hear about papers. You may wonder if other researchers and practitioners have benefited from your work. You will want to know if others -- potentially places that hire you -- find your career trajectory and accomplishments compelling. It’s normal, in the absence of better signals, to want to look around at your peers and start comparing your path: does your CV look like your labmates’? Do you have as many publications? Are you submitting as many things to CHI?
These comparisons often generate noisy feedback. Someone who does primarily ethnographic work will have a very different CV and portfolio of work than someone doing primarily lab studies, and someone who builds systems will have still a different path. If you do work that requires building a strong community or cross-disciplinary partnership, you might spend months finding common ground before you really start, but it may pay off later.
Careful, reflective comparisons can generate more helpful feedback. Identify colleagues whose career paths you admire and are similar to what you might want to pursue, and talk with me and your other mentors about similarities and differences.
Many careers come with mental health challenges. Unfortunately, academia and being a PhD student is one of them. Some of this is because of cultural and structural factors that we must–and many of us are–working to change. Some of these will be hard to change. The flexibility to work on projects largely of your choosing, considerable freedom to decide which and how many things to take on, and the long feedback loops between doing work and its (often ambiguous) evaluation combine to create some hard pressures.
Much of the above advice–avoiding unsustainable long hours, taking time off, and setting healthy work boundaries–is intended to support your health. I am also happy to talk with you about my experiences and strategies I follow to promote my own wellbeing, though with the caveat that what works for me may not work for you, and you should seek out advice from multiple mentors. I also am open to discussing health challenges and things we can do to support your health.
Talking with your mentors is not a substitute for working with a mental health provider. There are several mental health resources on campus, though unfortunately access to them can be long. I encourage you to use them, or off-campus resources, if you even think you might benefit. One of the more complete lists is in the PhD student resources drive (under Health and Wellbeing); campus resources are available through the Counseling Center at Husky Health. All services through the counseling center are available at no cost to students regardless of insurance.
Also, seasonal affective disorder is a real concern in Seattle. Consider a full spectrum light in addition to other self-care.
Harassment, sexual and otherwise, remains a problem in technology fields, academia, and elsewhere. If you experience or see harassment, I am available to work with you to figure out options and what next steps are right for you, and to support you throughout. Based on my experiences, ambiguity and concerns about spreading misinformation can prevent sharing an experience or further inquiring about a situation. For me, these have been missed opportunities to make my communities safer – so please do not worry that your concern is too small or too ambiguous to discuss.
Please know that, per UW Executive Order 81, I am required to report “conduct involving a University student that occurred during the student’s enrollment” as well as “UW workplace-related conduct” that may be prohibited by that order, including discrimination, discriminatory harassment, and sexual harassment, to UW Civil Rights Compliance.
If I am not the right person to talk with, UW also has designated confidential advocates.
I’ve been drawn to my research area, to HCDE, and to UW because I believe that each community generally values what matters, and hat each is constantly asking questions to test assumptions about what matters. Much of the guidance above is to perpetuate some healthy norms and to challenge some unhealthy ones. That said, we absolutely must continue to improve, and I’m open to conversations and changes.
I also recommend checking out the Changing Academic Life podcast, hosted by Geraldine Fitzpatrick, to hear a range of views and experiences.
Updated 21 May 2026.