Four Common Misconceptions of Graduate School

Last Friday I participated in CMU's Fusion Forum, a really fun program designed to improve recruitment of minority students into graduate school. In the panel session, a bunch of faculty discussed their thoughts on what it was like in graduate school.

I framed my thoughts in the form of four common misconceptions of PhD level work. They are:

1. Grades still matter in PhD programs.
Grades matter a lot in undergraduate programs, because you need a high enough GPA to be a plausible candidate to be admitted. However, once you are in a PhD program, grades matter only insofar as you need a good enough grade to pass required courses, and a high enough grade not to antagonize the instructor (who may be on your dissertation committee one day). Nobody really cares about your grades when you do the job search. What they care about is whether you can do original and insightful research.

2. In computer science, a lot of students think that the majority of their time will be spent programming. I had this misconception when I first started graduate school. In reality, I spent maybe 15% of my time programming, with the rest of it spent on thinking about what problem to solve, reading related work, talking about ideas with other folk, and doing presentations. This is why I look for people who can write and communicate well, and can think really well about problems.

3. Some students come into graduate school thinking that there will be a lot of structure and that they just need to do the work assigned to them. This is still an undergraduate way of thinking. In graduate school, you need to be able to go beyond this, and eventually teach us, the faculty, new and interesting things. Part of the goal of graduate school is to give you the tools and mindset so that you can accomplish this.

4. Some students believe that graduate school is primarily an individual activity with just more coursework. Graduate school is an apprenticeship, where you not only learn the tools and skills to conduct original research, but also become a member of the local community at your university, as well as a member of the international research community. Phil Agre has a great description of this community aspect of graduate work in his essay Networking on the Network.

Comments

ligue football said…
Very important information well done .
We need to know that.
4:55 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Fix a Jammed Toyota Camry Trunk

This problem needs a higher pagerank, so I figured I would post the solution here. If your Toyota Camry trunk won't open, one possible reason is that it is set to valet mode. Valet mode means that you cannot open the trunk using the release lever inside the car. To set valet mode, you put the key into the trunk lock and turn it counterclockwise. You will know that your trunk is in valet mode if the lock is horizontal rather than vertical, and if you cannot open the trunk using the lever near the driver's seat. Of course, a problem is that sometimes the Camry can get stuck in valet mode, such that you can't use your key to get out of it. (You can see how I spent part of my Sunday morning ...) The solution turns out to be WD-40 . Spray some WD-40 on your key and on the lock. Put the key in, and jiggle it around, and happiness ensues. From an interaction design perspective, it sort of makes sense to have a valet mode. After all, the point of having a valet key is to limit the
Read more

Web 2.0 and Research

I've been chatting with many of my friends and colleagues about an issue that's been bugging me for a while, namely whether academic research has any role to play in the emerging Web 2.0 . I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the answer is not much. I had a similar discussion with other researchers at HotMobile a few weeks ago. When the web first came out, pretty much every systems researcher ignored it because it was so ugly. The web was not very sophisticated in terms of distributed systems, HTTP lacked elegance, HTML conflated many different ideas, and so on. There were also not any really new ideas with the web, as evidenced by the fact that Tim Berners-Lee 's first paper on the Web was (probably rightfully) rejected from an ACM conference on hypertext. I'm sure one thing that really irked researchers about the nascent web was that it completely ignored the large body of work in hypertext and distributed systems that had preceded it. Even in 1997, as
Read more

NYTimes: It Takes a Cyber Village to Catch an Auto Thief

I like this idea of "open-source crime solving", as it reminds me a lot of PhishTank and CastleCops . It is, however, an idea that is fraught with issues of trust, reliability, and vigilantism. Online auto forums have helped unravel crimes before. Two years ago, a detective in Los Angeles used the forum on FreshAlloy.com, a Nissan enthusiast site, to track down victims of an elaborate fraud scheme. (That case, too, involved Nissan Skylines.) The Beyond.ca site had also played a role in earlier cases of what might be called open-source crime solving. A year ago one of its members saw a hit-and-run accident a block in front of him, said Shelton Kwan, who co-founded the site with his cousin Ken Chan in 2002. “He took pictures. And the guy who got hit was another member of ours.” NYTimes Link
Read more