Transcript Barbara Ryder

CAREER PATHS:
How to get started in
academia or industry?
Barbara G. Ryder
Rutgers University
GettingStarted, PL SumSch, Austin 5/07, BG Ryder
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Outline
• My personal career path
• Starting a research career
• How to ensure success?
• Academia and industrial research
environments
• Differences and similarities
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My Trail
Stanford
M.S., 1971
Brown
(Pembroke
College)
A.B., 1969,
Married Jon
Worked at Bell Labs
(UNIX, C) 1971-76;
Had my 2 children,
Beth & Andrew
Finished Ph.D
Joined DCS
Rutgers,1982
GettingStarted, PL SumSch, Austin 5/07, BG Ryder
Resumed Ph.D studies
Rutgers, 1977-82
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Hobbies:
Weight training
Travel photography
Crocheting
Cooking
My Trail
ACM Fellow, 1998
Full Prof, 1994
1989-97 SIGPLAN EC;
Kids finish college, 1996
Graduated 1st Ph.D;
Assoc. Prof, 1988
GettingStarted, PL SumSch, Austin 5/07, BG Ryder
Sabbatical at
IBM Research &
ENS, Paris, 2001
Collaborative NSF
grants w IBM &
O/S colleagues,
2001, 2002
Start RESCS in
CS1, 2004
Have supervised 14 Ph.Ds &
3 MS theses in 25 yrs
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Why do research?
• To satisfy intellectual curiosity
• To better understand things
• To be at the forefront of an exciting,
technical field
• To always be learning new things
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How to ensure success?
• Frame long-term questions to be answered
• Use short-term objectives to subdivide
research into manageable pieces
– Divide work into investigations that ‘fit’ into a
coherent whole
– Make progress one paper at a time
– Know what it means to ‘solve a problem’ or
validate a technique
– Re-examine your research achievements at
regular intervals, to ensure progress towards
answering long-term questions
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How to ensure success?
• Familiarize yourself with previous
work from the literature
• Critically examine previous
approaches, questioning generality,
practicality, validation
• Write papers and give talks about
your work
– Intuition, intuition, intuition
– Exercise: do an in-the-elevator summary
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How to ensure success?
• Find your personal style
– One at a time vs juggling several projects
– Set aside uninterruptible blocks of
‘research thinking time’ in your weekly
schedule and obey the schedule
– In collaborative projects, what role do you
enjoy most?
• Being a contributor vs being the leader
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Research Environments
• Academia
• Research university (public or private),
Four year college, Two year junior
college
• Combines teaching/mentoring with doing
research
• Offers tenure
• Requires grant writing to obtain
research funding
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Research Environments
• Industrial Research Lab
• Government (e.g., LRL, Argonne)
• Commercial (e.g., MSR, IBM Research)
• Offers mentoring of summer interns
• Provides funding (at least until you are
in middle management)
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Why choose either environment?
• Academia
– To interact with students
– To be free to choose own research agenda
– To have security of tenure
• Industry
– To work on problems with real societal impact
– To have access to real HW/SW systems and
their data;
– To work with colleagues that are other PhDs
instead of with students
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Comparing Academia w Industry
• Similarities
• Must take responsibility for own research
agenda
• Need for self-motivation and self-discipline
• Can choose environment with possible
collaborators
• Expect research to have impact
• Expect signs of active researcher
– Program committee service, regular conference and
workshop attendance
– Keeping up with current conferences and journals
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Comparing Academia w Industry
• Differences
• Who is your ‘boss’?
• How much freedom to choose and focus your
research?
• Do you need to seek research funding?
• How is research impact measured? Products?
Patents? Demos at developer conferences?
Open source contributions?
• Is it easy to move between these worlds?
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Why academia for me?
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Lifestyle (forever young)
Enjoyment of mentoring and teaching
Flexible work schedule
Always learning new ideas and techniques
Tolerant individualistic environment
Intellectually challenging job
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Interesting Websites
• Women in academia
http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/~hendren/WomenInScience/
• Women in CS
http://people.mills.edu//spertus/Gender/gender.html
• CRA-W
http://www.cra.org/Activities/craw/
• ACM-W
http://women.acm.org/
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Thank You
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