Week 2: Research Interests/Time Management Informatics 201 Prof. Bill Tomlinson

NSF GRFP How many students are planning to apply? End a few minutes early so we can chat.

Pitch ThisCausesThat Research Project (Melissa suggested)

Goal of Academia Two Key Pieces – Discovering/inventing interesting stuff. – Telling the world about it.

Discovering/Inventing Study what’s there? Make new stuff? Both? (Can you effectively make new stuff without studying what’s there’s first?)

Having Bold Thoughts Stake drivers and pebble pilers

Research Methods Help to understand/create it.

Telling The World Cause people to believe/accept it.

Dissemination paths Publications Conference presentations Demos Press Informal interactions

To Help Demonstrate the Value of Appropriate Research Methods…

Counter Example 1 Thesis: “The smartest people in this class are sitting on the left side of the room.” Why is this flawed? What might my methods have been? What’s wrong with its methods? Why wouldn’t people believe it?

Research Methods How could we do a better job of solving a problem like this?

Definitions How is smart different from tall or old? Whose left?

Procedures How do we identify individuals, measure phenomena?

Presentation How would we convince different audiences of a statement of this kind?

Counter Example 2 Research Question: What are the best parts of this class?

The Wrong Methods Quantitative via Likert Scales – Strongly disagree – Disagree – Neither agree nor disagree – Agree – Strongly agree Take 10 minutes and write up a 5-10 Likert-scale questionnaire that seeks to address this question.

Compare questionnaires

Audience Best to whom? Students? Administration? Faculty? Candid camera?

Methods How might you find out?

Counter Example 3 Research Question: – What is the average blood sugar level in the class? Methods: – You may use only personal interviews.

What Methods You Use… Are largely determined by what you are trying to figure out, and who you are trying to convince.

More on Methods Throughout the Course

Questions?

Break

Research What are your research interests? Foner: What are you really trying to do? Moshell: Take all your projects and look at the intersection.

“I’m a screenwriter.” You are what you publish.

Volunteers to Show CV? For the rest of the class: what can we tell about them? What are their research interests? With what disciplines/groups do they affiliate?

Team up, pick ICS prof, analyze CV Basic structure of CV What does an academic career look like?

Questions About CVs?

Readings

GWYCF 10, 11 Go over notes

Why Grad Students Succeed or Fail More than 30 percent of all graduate students never feel that they have a faculty mentor. Two-thirds of graduate students enter Ph.D. programs without any debt, suggesting that those concerned about expanding the pipeline to graduate education should pay attention to the affordability of undergraduate education. Students rate their social interaction with faculty members as high in the engineering, sciences, mathematics and education -- and relatively low in the social sciences and humanities. In rating the quality of academic interactions, students in the humanities think highly of their professors while those in the social sciences and math and science are more critical. Significant gaps exist in the experiences of minority and female graduate students -- from admissions to getting teaching or research assistant jobs to publishing research while still in graduate school. Generally, these gaps do not favor minority students.

Assignment for next week Find one or more people whom you might aspire to be like, professionally. Examine their CV/resume/bio/web presence closely. What is it about them that you would like to emulate? Write a future CV of yourself. Both content and formatting. Upload to EEE DropBox and bring one copy to class next week.

Time Management Discuss Judy Olson’s plan

Hourly Being on time Not double booking Technological support

Daily What is your circadian rhythm like?

Weekly How will you make steady, incremental progress, without much supervision, on a project that will span for hundreds of weeks?

Monthly Integrating with other people’s calendars. When scheduling my defense, 3 months out, there was exactly one 3-hour block where my four committee members were all available.

Yearly Knowing how to manage a research project at this scale. PhDs have been forced to learn how to do this better than most people. Good engineers develop the skill of predicting how long something will take.

Decade-ly Where do you want to be in 10 years? What are your life goals?

Centurally Hiroshi story. What will your impact be in 200 years?

Questions re: Time Management?

The End (for Today) Discuss NSF GRFP.