Embedded in Academia

Category: Academia

  • The 5+5 Commandments of a Ph.D.

    [This post is co-authored and co-posted with my colleagues Matt and Suresh. Comments should all go to Suresh’s version.] There have been a lot of Ph.D.-bashing articles lately. There have been some spirited defenses of a Ph.D. too. Most of these articles make good observations, but they’re often about the larger Ph.D. ecosystem and therefore…

  • Grading on a Curve

    Although university professors aren’t trained as teachers, many parts of teaching — lecturing, answering questions, creating tests — come naturally to most of us. Assigning grades, on the other hand, is a part of the game that I’ve never felt very comfortable about. Part of the problem is that as a student I found grades…

  • Sometimes the Name Is the Contribution

    Every now and then I read or re-read a famous, influential paper and realize (or at least suspect strongly) that it did not — at the time it was published — contain any new ideas. My guess is that a paper like this can become highly cited for one or more of the following reasons:…

  • Taking Grants for Granted

    Proposal-writing talent is unevenly distributed among researchers, and so is grant money. Furthermore, there are strong positive feedback loops where grant money leads to more publications, bigger group size, and increased reputation, all of which make it easier to get subsequent awards. It struck me, then, while skimming the list of Google Research Award winners…

  • Interviewing PhD Students

    Although I work with a great collection of students, I’ve come to realize that my selection of students is based too much on luck and not enough on my skill in evaluating them. Therefore, I have a serious question for the professors out there, and particularly for the computer science professors in systems-related areas: Given…

  • Wanted: One RSS Feed Per Conference

    I attend a few computer science conferences each year, and look closely at the proceedings for another half dozen. I know how to deal with these conferences. On the other hand, the conferences that give me trouble are the next 25 or so that I’m passingly interested in, that probably each contain 1-2 papers per…

  • Staying Sane in Academia

    This is a quick followup to this post from the other day. Here I’m going to list a few of the strategies I’ve developed for keeping my job from driving me crazy. Find places to work: home, the library, the coffee shop, whatever. Although new professors are often able to get work done in the…

  • Some Good and Bad Things About Academia

    Partially in response to Matt and Daniel‘s posts, I wanted to list a few things I like about being a professor: It’s a good match for my short attention span. If I get interested in something new, I can drop everything and work on it for a while. When I get tired of a project,…

  • Reviewers Get Worse Over Time

    This is a depressing paper. The study shows that: 92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision) The quality of reviews that I write has definitely decreased over the 12 or so years that I’ve been…

  • Computer Systems Evaluation Mistake #1

    Tonight I wrote this in a paper review: The results section of this paper contains what is probably the most elementary and most annoying flaw that could possibly plague a computer systems paper.  All of the numbers are relative and we’re never told the absolute values.  It’s great that you can achieve a 30% reduction…