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 [...]
December 30, 2010
Looking a gift horse in the mouth
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 [...]
October 8, 2009
How to find a postdoc
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. [...]
October 5, 2009
What theory should every non-theory Ph.D. student know?
I’ve survived my first week of teaching graduate algorithms and data structures. “Survived” really isn’t the right word. I’ve had a lot of fun and the students in the class are bright and interactive, which makes a 50 minute lecture go by in a flash. Since the time is going by so quickly, I realize [...]
September 13, 2009
Algorithms advertising for incoming grad students
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 [...]