Prospective Students

If you're interested in working in the Metoyer research group, this page contains information about my expectations and goals in advising a student. If you have any questions, please email me at rmetoyer@nd.edu

General

My lab works on problems that generally fall in the domain of Human-Computer Interaction. We identify problems in the HCI domain and study them. Sometimes this requires that we build solutions to address these problems and then study those solutions to understand their effectiveness.

Excellence

My expectations of students are high. Anyone working in my lab must be passionate about the problems we're addressing and interested in becoming an expert in the problem area. I expect students to always strive for excellence - that is, we work on interesting problems, conduct sound research, and report our findings clearly to make impactful contributions to the field and ultimately our communities.

Teamwork

I expect students to be reliable and consistent in their research efforts. I expect students to be actively engaged with the research team and responsive to requests for their attention. I expect students to operate as a member of the team - working together to produce high quality work. We will all help each other achieve our goals - no one should be working on an island alone.

Leadership

I expect students to be leaders. You are ultimately responsible for your work. Be prepared for meetings. Lead the conversations. Tell me what problems you are encountering and what you need from me to make progress.

Creativity

I expect students to be creative. While we will often follow fairly precise methodology in our research, there is always room for creative thinking. This may take the form of creative solutions to problems, creative approaches to methodology, or identification of new and interesting avenues of research. In fact, I encourage students to take a small percentage of their time each week (say 10% ...after addressing weekly research tasks), to focus on a problem of interest that is not necessarily tied to the current research effort.

Writing and Presenting

I expect students to write and present their work regularly. Writing is often one of the more difficult things for students to do regularly but is critical to research. Set aside time weekly to write and make progress on communicating research results (even if you don't yet have results!). You don't have to have results to envision the paper with the results you expect to get. Write , write, write!