Glencora Borradaile

I’ve just finished teaching our undergraduate algorithms course this quarter.  I changed the course quite a bit from previous iterations.  This was mostly because I have been designing an online version of the course for our online post-bacc degree (more on that in another post).  It gave me a chance to rethink many aspects of [...]

Last spring and summer I instituted “my time”.  I started scheduling off 3hr blocks of time 2-3 times a week on my calendar for research.  This happened around the time that I started making my calendar available so students would know when to find me.  (It has made scheduling meetings very easy.)  But I wanted [...]

I just finished writing a grant proposal which, while I spent more time on it than I wanted, I had purposely left not much time for it.  I do tend to spend as much time as I give myself on things, which is why I like teaching in the morning and not preparing for lecture [...]

I received some advice from an established biochemist via a friend in regards to the stress related to advising graduate students.  See, of the new tasks in the past year, graduate advising has been the most stressful for me.  I feel this weight of a person’s career in my hands.  What if I pick the [...]

When I was a grad student, I was in a professor’s office when an undergrad stopped by to give the professor an art card as a thank you for writing a recommendation letter.  The professor kindly turned down the gesture.  At the time, I thought that, as the offering was little more than a greeting [...]

I was just sitting down to write the first1 reference letter that I have ever written and realized that I have never read a reference letter and have little idea of what should go into one.  This particular letter is for a graduate student applying for a fellowship.  Short post, but any suggestions? Maybe I [...]

While I hardly think I should be doling out advice … In algorithms, there have been a lot of postdoc positions advertising on the two main email lists, TheoryNT and dmanet.  In my experience, many of the positions are in Europe.  I’ve found that a lot of postdoc’s get their position by word of mouth. [...]