Mentoring
A lab is an apprenticeship. Here is what that means in practice — what I ask of you, and what you should expect from me.
I would rather say this plainly up front than have anyone discover it a year in. The list below is not a contract, but it is close to one: it is what I try to hold myself to, and what I will hold you to.
- Ownership. The project is yours. I will help you steer it, but you are the one who knows it best.
- Honesty about results. Negative results reported early are worth more than positive results reported late.
- Show the work. Come to meetings with what you tried, including what failed. "I'm stuck" is a complete and welcome answer.
- Rigor. Derivations that close, code that runs from a clean checkout, plots with axes and units.
- Care for the group. Review each other's drafts, share hardware fairly, help the person who joined last month.
- Communicate early. If something — health, funding, visa, family — is affecting your work, tell me while I can still help.
- Real supervision. A standing weekly one-on-one that I do not cancel, plus an open door between them.
- Training, not tasking. You will learn the mathematics and the hardware, not just run the experiment I designed.
- Authorship you earned. Clear, discussed-in-advance authorship. Your first-author papers are yours.
- Funding and equipment. Support for conferences, and access to the robots you need without a queue.
- A network. Introductions to collaborators, and active help finding your next position from the day you start.
- A career that is yours. Academia, industry, or something else — I will help you get there, not just to my next grant.
Joining the lab
If the research here interests you, write to me at jlachner@purdue.edu. Please include a short note on what specifically caught your attention — a paper, a project, an idea you disagree with — along with your CV. A sentence showing you read something of ours matters more than a long cover letter.
Prospective PhD students: you must also apply through the graduate program; emailing me does not substitute for that, but it does mean I will look for your file.
Undergraduates and master's students: mention how many hours per week you can commit and for how long. Short, focused projects work better than open-ended ones.