Is it appropriate to ask my supervisor about publication of future results now?

Question

I'm doing my Master's degree in applied mathematics. I went there from CS department, because of multiple recommendations.

I knew before, that the most successful people of my university are usually students/graduates from this maths department. However, I was very surprised, when I found out, that the successful ones are usually chosen by professors during B.S. or very early during their Master's degree.

Every reputable professor has one or two so called "golden children" who have incredible (and insuperable usually) advantage over other students, who are not collaborating with the "best" professor so tightly.

Because of some awards I got for my Bachelor's thesis, I was offered a place in our research center and so far, I'm doing pretty well there. I talked about my ideas with one of the professors (very reputable, he's probably second in our uni just to one much older professor) and he was excited about them and offered himself to supervise my Master's thesis. Moreover, as a specialist advisor will be my immediate superior in research team, who has great ties to some good U.S. universities (we're in Europe), he even got his PhD from one of them.

So far so good, I was excited about all of this, but then I found, that some other professors care incredibly much about their students, to the point where on of my colleagues has arranged place in the international conference even before he started writing his Bachelor's thesis!

Now I'm not trying to degrade him, despite his age he's a very good mathematician and I have no doubts that with "his" professor's help, his thesis will be great.

The point is, I'd love start publishing papers as soon as possible, especially, when I'm working on two research projects which are both directly connected to my thesis's topic, so my thesis will have a lot of foundations from the beginning (so I don't have to start with the whole topic "from scratch").

Do you think it's inappropriate to talk with the professor about this? Not that I'd want to compare him to other professors, I'd simply want to tell him that I'm willing to publish some papers as soon as it'll be possible, because I think it'll help my career very much.

Answer 1

It's actually a very smart idea to talk with your advisor about publications as early as is reasonable: that is, once you think you have a handle on what the papers will be about, you should initiate the discussion. By starting the discussion early—before you begin writing the manuscript—you can begin to deal with some of the important questions associated with writing and publishing:

• What is the main messages and results of the paper?
• To what journal will I send the manuscript?
• What form will the manuscript take?
• Who will be authors and co-authors?

The longer you put off this discussion, the greater the probability that problems that could have been easily averted earlier will persist.