CAREER PATHS: How to get started in academia or industry?

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CAREER PATHSHow to get started in academia or
industry?

• Barbara G. Ryder
• Rutgers University

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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
Brown (Pembroke College) A.B., 1969, Married Jon
Stanford M.S., 1971
Worked at Bell Labs (UNIX, C) 1971-76 Had my 2
children, Beth Andrew
Resumed Ph.D studies Rutgers, 1977-82
Finished Ph.D Joined DCS Rutgers,1982
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My Trail
Hobbies Weight training Travel
photography Crocheting Cooking
Sabbatical at IBM Research ENS, Paris, 2001
Collaborative NSF grants w IBM O/S colleagues,
2001, 2002
ACM Fellow, 1998
Full Prof, 1994 1989-97 SIGPLAN EC Kids finish
college, 1996
Start RESCS in CS1, 2004
Graduated 1st Ph.D Assoc. Prof, 1988
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?

• 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.htm
  l
• CRA-W
• http//www.cra.org/Activities/craw/
• ACM-W
• http//women.acm.org/

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Thank You