Friday, February 09, 2007

Made It To The Weekend

Thankfully, it's Friday. I'm feeling much better, and the conference deadline that was supposed to be today has been extended to Monday. So, I might actually be able to do a halfway respectable job on the paper.

I did have one interesting moment today, though. One of my coauthors is a grad student, and I'll be one of the supervisors for her dissertation. She made an error in calculating a measure. In fact, it wasn't a small one - she totally misunderstood the intent of what she was supposed to be trying to accomplish.

As I tried to explain it to her, she kept interrupting and trying to explain what she had done and why. At some point, I simply had to tell her "I really don't care why you did it that way. What you did is wrong, and you need to do it my way." She then wanted me to look at her program to see where she went wrong.

Sorry, that's her problem. It sounds harsh, but it's the best (and maybe the only) way for her to learn. It'll take her far longer to do it than it would take me (by about a factor of 10), but there's a reason why I'm faster - I've done it a lot (and made a lot of mistakes along the way that I've subsequently had to fix).

Sometimes the only way to learn how to do it right is to suck it up and do it, find out where you've erred, and then make corrections.

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