Week 2: Research Interests/Time Management

Informatics 201Prof. 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.