week 2: research interests/time management informatics 201 prof. bill tomlinson
Post on 19-Dec-2015
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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?)
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?
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.
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.
Research
• What are your research interests?
• Foner: What are you really trying to do?
• Moshell: Take all your projects and look at the intersection.
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?
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.
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.