One of my first professorial tasks will be a 4-minute talk to incoming grad students. I don’t expect any of the students in the audience will be explicitly interested in algorithms research. After all, when they applied, there weren’t any algorithms profs here to advise them. So, I’m not sure what the best use of this time is.
I could ignore the fact that they are likely interested in doing everything but proofs and give my 4 minute blurb as though there were potentially interested students in the audience. I could appeal to the coadvising role of “whatever your research is, there is probably an algorithmic viewpoint”. I could just say “this is what algorithms is” and leave it at that. Besides, (and lucky for me) all the CS Ph.D. students have to take a grad algorithms class – and guess who is teaching that in the first quarter.
However, as far as I know, the EE and masters students don’t have to take the algorithms class. Do you think I should be convincing them to?
I did the same thing two years in a row (then I stopped doing it). 5 minutes is way too short to do anything. My sneaky approach was to describe the application (data mining) rather than the theory (geometry and streaming).
Pros: I got lots of students to talk to me
Con: the fit wasn’t great.
The grad algorithms class is a much better advertising mechanism. Also, some MS students might actually want to do a Ph.D, so no harm roping them in 🙂
I would suggest to give a taste of one concrete cool result which would be at the level of your course — “proofiness” is sort of inherent in everyone to some degree I think and maybe you could find some people with it to join your course if you show them it leads to interesting ways of thinking.
That having been said, I’m not sure what would be the best such result. I have seen origami in a programming course and Seinfeld episodes in a calculus course as a way of trying to reach out. Maybe there is a good way to talk about the Halting Theorem in a way that relates to football?
As a graduate of Oregon State, yes, I do think you should be roping in the Master’s students. For their own good, they need to master this aspect of computational thinking. Congratulations on your appointment to my old school, and best wishes as you start your new career.