Title: On life in academia Serge Abiteboul INRIA-Futurs and Univ. Paris 11
1On life in academia Serge AbiteboulINRIA-Futurs
and Univ. Paris 11
2Organization
- Introduction
- Some questions you always wanted to ask
- Performance evaluation
- Success optimization
- Result Life is great in academia
- Conclusion
3Introduction
4What is academia?
- Academia is a collective term for the scientific
and cultural community engaged in higher
education and research, taken as a whole. - The word comes from the akademeia just outside
ancient Athens, where the gymnasium was made
famous by Plato as a center of learning...
Wikipedia - Also on the Web (Google defineacademia)
- Hypothetical or theoretical and not expected to
produce an immediate or practical result. - Marked by a narrow focus on or display of
learning especially its trivial aspects
5Why go to academia?
- To manage people
- To be rich
- To not work
- To be famous
- To have power
- To be useful
- try the army
- try start-ups
- try a rich spouse
- try show business or serial killer
- try politics
- try NGO
6Some reasonable reasons
- Tough question
- Because you cannot do anything else
- Because you dont have any better idea
- We will come back to that
7How do they spend their time?Conflicting demands
- The tasks
- Teaching
- Research
- Including system development/experimentation
- Advising (PhD students, etc.)
- Grants
- Reviewing
- Industry and consulting
- And the normal life family, friends, hobbies,
sports - Time management is the big issue
8May vary depending on institutions where ?
- Teaching load varies from 0 to hundreds of hours
per year - Industry academic research centers IBM, MS,
Lucent (rare) - Pure research institutes such as INRIA (rare)
- I teach 30-40 hours a year but I dont have to
- University
- Depends on the university much less at Stanford
U. than at San Jose State - Depends on the country less in UK than in France
than in Germany - In China?
- Implication in software development also varies a
lot
9How do I spend my time
- Not the way you would expect ?
- And not improving with time ?
other activities
real research
education
social
10How do you spend your time in academia?
- Some university in the US
- Source private Jennifer Widom (expert in time
management) - Travel too varied to quantify
- Conferences, visiting colleagues, grant-related
meetings, etc. - Light (each lt1 hour/week)
- Coffee and lunch breaks
- Prospective think of new topics
- Read research papers you dont have to review
11How do you spend your time in academia?
- Medium (each 1-5 hours/week)
- Deliver lectures
- Department duties committees, faculty meetings,
etc. - Write research papers
- Reviewing
- Grant-related work (proposals, reports, etc.)
- Read drafts of student
- Heavy (each gt5 hours/week)
- Handle e-mail of all sorts
- Prepare class lectures, handouts, assignments,
exams - Research meetings including meetings with PhD
students
12Spending time in front of a dull machine
- Reading/writing code documentation
- Reading/writing papers
- Reading/writing emails
- Blogging about life in academia
13Work-Life balance
- There is no limit to the number of papers/lines
of code you can write - There is little limit to working hours
- If you dont think you can balance, choose
another job - Rumor job-related stress is the main cause for
leaving academia - Opposite rumor people join academia because of
less stress
14The ancient rituals
- When the season comes, the researchers gather in
some fancy place for bizarre rituals with weird
names that make sense only to the initiated, such
as SIGMOD, PODS, VLDB - The main point is networking
- Not for favors
- Perhaps to be part of the crowd
- To meet the colleagues you want to work with
- Hitting bars is more important than attending
talks (dont repeat this to your advisors they
know)
Sponsored link
15Warning You came too late
- The time of these gatherings is counted because
of their ecologically disastrous effect
16Tough life Think about it
- Academia is a very competitive environment
- Do you know many places with such a high
percentage of PhDs? - Academia is loaded with smart people who are
perhaps - faster
- more knowledgeable
- better at writing code or proving theorems
- than you
Sponsored link
17Performance evaluation
18Evaluation is essential in academic life
- You will be evaluated all the time
- For papers to conferences and journals
- For grants, awards
- By ranking in GoogleScholar, Citeseer, h-index
- For promotion also
- People sometimes get reviews such as this is
stupid or no real contribution - Dont worry
- This is life and life is tough
- This is the price to pay for having one of the
greatest jobs on earth - This is not going to improve with time
19Evaluation pitfalls
- It is not because your work was rejected that it
is trash - Reviewers are sometimes wrong
- May be you are ahead of your time
- (2) It is not because your work was accepted that
you are a star - Reviewers are sometimes wrong
- May be you just did some timely increment
- I have seen colleagues (including myself)
indulging in both - ? Both are negative and lead to psychological
disorders - ? Both are positive and lead to breakthroughs
- You become modest and work harder
- You are driven to push further your works dare
wild ideas
20Evaluation the two sides of the coin
- The reviewers and reviewee are the same people
- They are too busy and they sometimes do a poor
job at it - Remember! you are both reviewer and reviewee
- As a reviewer, do reviews seriously as a service
to the community - As a reviewee, try to understand the point of the
reviewer - There is always the chance that she is smarter
than you - Even if he is not so smart, he is the one
deciding! - And this is the best known system,
- arguably better than a random function (not
proven though)
21Evaluation what you should try to remember
Peer reviewing is arguably the best known system
22Success optimization
23Optimizing your chances of success
- Learn to manage your time
- Try to focus your time/energy on the essential
- Work hard
- Most successful people I have met in academia are
hard workers - Kiss! keep it simple stupid!
- This is true for systems but also for theory
- Human quality matters
- Most of the successful works I have seen are
teamwork - The quality of relationships in the workplace is
a key ingredient to success - In particular, the weird alchemy between
colleagues (e.g., between advisor and advisee)
24Optimizing your chances of success
- Choose carefully your research topic
- Is it new? Elegant? Technically Challenging?
Useful? - Is it fun?
- Quotes (apocryphal )
- I had this idea of a topic. I got drunk. It still
sounded like a topic. Then I decided it was one. - Italian researcher who asked to remain anonymous
- This idea is crazy and will probably not work. It
is so much unlike everything I have seen before.
Who cares! Lets try it for the fun. - French researcher who is declining any
responsibility
25Result life is great in academia
26Why it is such a great job
- Intellectually exciting and challenging
- I dont know of any job that is as much fun
- (perhaps writing novels but thats too
competitive) - Less repetitive than other jobs
- When you get tired of a topic, you change
- Freedom and independence
- No real boss
- Freedom to choose what you want to work on
- Rich human interactions with smart and
international people - Socially positive
- People think it is a cool job
- Clearly useful (for teaching and perhaps research)
I am free!!!!
2710 highlights of life in academia
- Some light of understanding in the eyes of the
audience - The excitement of the arrival of a new PhD
student - The deliverance of the departure of a PhD student
(aka defense) - The success of your ex-students in their career
- The orgasm of proving a theorem that resisted for
months - The delight of having your system finally do
something real - The ecstasy of having a paper accepted at a top
conference - The happiness of seeing your paper cited and
(with Gods help) even read - The joy of seeing a book that you wrote on the
desk of a colleague
There are only 9! Just to check whether you are
listening carefully
AbiteboulHullVianu
28Conclusion
29Do not freak out!
- Dont be overwhelmed by your responsibility in
the progress of science - Anyway, most of the time you will be too busy to
think about it - I wont let my very high philosophical
expectations of research interfere with my main
goal that is to get - A PhD
- A job
- Tenure
- This grant
- Other (indicate what) .
30And the most important
- Sponsored links
- INRIA INRIA proposes postdocs in many
areas. Tell your friends - Gemo, Paris INRIAs database group. The
best environment for database research
- Enjoy your time as PhD student
- If you choose academia, enjoy it!
-
31Merci
Merci
Sigmod/Pods, Beijing 2007
32Bibliography
- David Lodge Going places other novels
- Batya Gur Literary murder
- http//chronicle.com/jobs/blogs.htm a list of
blogs about life in academia I did not find the
time to read them - ACM Sigmod record interviews by Marianne Winslett