> An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. There is a tradeoff he

> An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. There is a tradeoff here. One of Eric's selling points for his lab is obviously that students get a lot of intellectual freedom to develop their own ideas. This is the "wandering the woods" approach, which was my advisor's as well. The advantage is the freedom, as well as the responsibility and intellectual independence that comes from exercising it. The disadvantage is that it can lead to a lot of wasted time and dead ends. The "guided coaching exercise", when taken to the opposite extreme, results in an advisor that hands a project with clearly defined goals and outcomes to the student. That kind of approach usually, in my experience, leads to more and higher-impact papers. It does not develop the student very well, but it does develop their CV, which is quite important, and once that student becomes a postdoc, it is do-or-die time, and every CV item helps. But if we just view this advice as "how should someone doing a project conceptualize their project", this is good advice. Although you would be astonished how many PIs don't follow it. I've had PIs want to write papers before seeing a single figure. I've had countless collaborators send me data to analyze without any clear idea what sort of results/analysis they want, without a hypothesis even.