What Research Meetings Actually Feel Like

I had my first real research meeting with Prof. Paulik in late August. Not a class, not office hours — a working meeting about a project I was contributing to. I want to write down what it felt like before I forget.

The thing that surprised me most was how much of the meeting was questions rather than answers. I came in expecting to be given direction — a task, a dataset, a baseline to run. Instead, the first twenty minutes was her asking me what I thought the problem actually was, what the existing work got wrong, where I saw the gap.

I wasn’t ready for that. I had read the relevant papers. I knew the MedRAG architecture. But I hadn’t formed an opinion about what it got wrong or where the opportunity was. I had been preparing to execute, not to think.

That’s the gap I keep running into. Industry work trains you to be a good executor — take a well-defined problem and solve it efficiently. Research requires you to first argue that the problem is real and that your framing of it is the right one. That argument comes before any code gets written.

The other thing I noticed: Prof. Paulik asked questions she didn’t know the answer to. That sounds obvious but it was disorienting at first. In industry, most questions in meetings are checks — does this person know what they’re doing. In a research meeting, the questions are genuine. We were both trying to figure something out. That dynamic changes everything about how you show up.

I left the meeting with more questions than I arrived with. That felt like failure at first. Now I think it means it was a good meeting.