A nice perk of starting my full-time position in January is that I have 3 uniterrupted months “off.” I say “off” instead of off because I am not truly without academic responsibility. For example, I participated in a CCC workshop on finding “grand challenges” in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity and am shepherding the writing of one of the four […]
Category: Grad life
Beginnings: Old and New
“I want to be a C. scientist” That’s what I told my brother, with an impish grin. He was visiting Bombay from New York, circa 1997, during a break from his studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He was pursuing a degree in Computer Science. He asked me what I wanted to be when […]
The Art of Rebutting
This is a post on how to rebut reviews. Specifically, CHI reviews. The ideas presented here probably apply to rebuttals more broadly, but much of what I’m going to speak about in this post is specific to CHI. Okay, so the long, long — so long — wait is over and you have your CHI […]
Lesson Learned From Proposing My Thesis: Presenting
You’ve got your committee and you’ve scheduled a date. You’ve got your document written. Now, you need to present and defend your thesis proposal. In many ways, the presentation is the most frightening part of the process. Your committee will ask tough questions now so that they don’t have to at your defense. Those tough […]
Lessons Learned From Proposing My Thesis: Writing
Once you’ve got your committee sorted, it’s time to get to work. You’ll need to write up a document and then present it to your committee. But, you already know that. Really, the first step is to discuss your plans with your committee. I’m going to assume you’ve done that already because I’m probably not […]
Lessons Learned From Proposing My Thesis: Committee Selection
I proposed my thesis in March of 2016. So, I am now ABD (“all-but-dissertation”) and it’s awesome — I genuinely have no work responsibility apart from Research. Still, it was nerve-racking getting to this point. I remember clearly being on the other side of the proposal and thinking of it as a wildling thinks of […]
5 Ph.D. Survival Tips
I recently had to give a short presentation on “survival tips” as a Ph.D. student [1]. I thought I’d summarize that presentation in written form, too. Now, there’s a lot of material out there on how to succeed as an academic and as a professional. This post is going to be a rehashing of those […]
How To Conference, Pt. 1: Networking
Conferences can be fun and exciting. You get to travel, meet new people from all around the world, reconnect with old friends, and learn about bleeding-edge work. If you are a student, you even get to do all of this for free [1]. But, conferences can also be nerve-racking — for newcomers and veterans alike. […]
The Day You Became An Academic Writer
I went from being a good writer to being an academic writer after five years of grad school. I couldn’t believe how convoluted it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste half of your life in academia. Academic writing is about self-aggrandizing and duplicity. The main technique is […]
Academia or Industry? A Societally Significant Choice
This is the final installment of a four-part series of posts I’m writing to crystallize my own thoughts on “The Question”: Academia or Industry? The question is framed dichotomously, but what it really is getting at is something deeper: You’ve deferred being an adult for a while now, but what do you want to do […]