Hi everyone, I'm Christina. I'm a third year
mechanical engineering doctorate student and I'm here to vlog
about collaboration. And joining me today is another one of
the michigan vloggers.
Hey everyone, I'm Won. Fitting that
we're collaborating on this vlog about collaboration. I am a
second year PhD student in computer science, also at Michigan. And
you might have seen me also in one of the previous vlogs.
In terms of collaboration, could you give like a quick background of sort of
your experience with that? You know what kind of collaborations did you do,
who is it with, and sort of like that, yeah.
Yeah, so I work in an interdisciplinary space. I work with
polymers. And so right now we're looking at how
the polymerization of blood clotting
happens so we actually have a — my lab, who's looking at it from a
fluids perspective. We have a biology lab that's looking at from a
chemical perspective, and then we have a doctor who's looking at it from a
diagnostic point of view. So all of us are coming together on this
project and that'll probably be where a lot of my stories come from.
What about you?
My experience with collaboration was mainly
within people in my lab. And I guess one experience I could draw
from is that we did do a collaboration with another lab. Our
group was kind of focused on machine learning and then their group was kind
of focused on more of the hardware security part and so we
worked together to do sort of a joint paper
that analyzed some security thing from both the machine learning
as well as the hardware side, and so that's sort of where I'm drawing my
examples from.
How has your collaboration been
different since you left underground?
If I can summarize it in like one word, it's basically more professional.
The idea of, you know, it's a little bit more okay—or, not okay—but it seems that
people are more forgiving in undergrad if you
sort of slack on a group project or something like that, but in definitely
grad school if you don't do your part then, you know, it's a really big
let down. And chances are there are actually more
serious repercussions. You know, in grad school if you're not doing your part and
you sort of aren't a good team player then it's quite likely that no one wants
to work with you and you'll kind of get left out on future group projects.
That's what I have seen in computer science, maybe you
can add some stuff to that.
Yeah, so I think for for me a lot of my
undergrad projects were within my department,
so we all had similar coursework and knowledge and it's really different now
going to work with an MD who's been, you know,
working in the emergency room for years and explaining something
I learned as a sophomore, the fundamentals of my field,
and trying to do it in a way that's not condescending because
he's gonna turn around and do the same to me just because
our educational tracks were so different.
Do you have any examples of collaborations you've worked on
maybe that have been able to contribute in positive ways to different
projects or to industry?
Again, the thing that I'm going to talk
about is the one big collaboration that we did that led
to the security paper. But basically it was trying to analyze
security of the sensor that's commonly used in autonomous
vehicles, and so they call it a LIDAR sensor. Which
is basically—you can imagine it as radar, except instead
of using radio waves it uses lasers. We had the partnership with the
hardware people who really knew how to analyze
the LIDAR from a physical perspective, from hardware. They knew exactly how it
worked, and how to attack it, and then we tackled it from the software
side. You know, how can we attack that from the software side? So it
led to a much stronger paper because we were able to tackle all aspects of
it. And so it was a collaboration that worked out
pretty well.
Yeah.
Was there anything challenging
about that collaboration that you would like
advise others might come up?
That actually went pretty well. People
were on the same page, um, but, you know, if you're
asking for other collaborations that didn't go too well
I've heard stories of people sort of being left out, for
example. So maybe you could argue that that
grad student was trying to be helpful or just like trying to not have them do
too much work, but you know talking from if you're on
the other side it can be very frustrating to sort of have that feeling
that you're being pushed aside on a project that you're actually supposed to
be working on.
So let's flip it around and talk about
something that you did that worked really well.
Yeah, I'll go back a little bit. So I was able to do an internship
at Children's National Hospital and we actually got to
deploy. We made a tracking system using
electromagnets for laparoscopic surgery. And there was this really cool incidence
where I was sitting in the cafeteria with the surgeon like over lunch and I
handed him a prototype and he like, as soon as he
grabbed it he like had three things I should change about it
that hadn't come up from the engineering side. He's like, "Oh, well I hold it like
this, and my thumb's here so you should move,
um, you know the sensor 90 degrees," or
something and seeing that immediate feedback
and then being able to implement it so that when it got brought
to FDA trials it was that much more useful,
I think was like super duper exciting for me.
Sounds like something that
honestly, you know, came out way better because you
were able to work together.
For our final topic, do you have any tips
or tricks to make collaboration work? Because it
seems that, you know, if collaboration
goes well you get super positive results like you
mentioned, but if it doesn't go so well it can be quite frustrating.
Yeah,
so I think my first one is just kind of this idea of being an emotional
support. There's a lot of failures in research so if you're on a low
maybe one of your teammates can encourage you to keep going and that,
you know, there's light at the end of the tunnel.And then when you're on a high
and they're on a low you can do the reverse.
So I think, yeah,
just being emotionally available even in a
professional setting can be really helpful.
And I think communicating, kind of getting meta
again, communicating how you're gonna communicate
because, like we've had both sides of the coins, like micromanagement and then
like ghosting. And so really spending time establishing
the norms together and intentionally instead of
just letting them like occur however they may.
Yeah I like the,
uh, I like— you basically hit all the stuff that I
was gonna say. So I guess one thing that I would add I guess is
with different collaborations you probably work on different teams and
with different groups of people and so the one thing I
would add is probably to just be flexible.
What works with one team or what worked with your previous
group might not work well with this particular group of people.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much it. Alright, with that
do you have anything to add?
Nope! Cool.
Alright, cool! Take care! Alright, see ya!