I just got back from my second trip to California in one month. This time I was presenting a paper at the iConference in Los Angeles; the paper is a leaner, cleaner version of my thesis research on hiring in the iSchools. To my delight, I got my first citation during the first paper in the first session of the conference! So now that my thesis has been cited, I’m hoping that I can work it into a journal article submission. My advisor made a great suggestion to pull in some narrative of the development trajectory for computer science for comparison. I probably won’t get a chance to follow up on that until summer, but it’s on the to-do list.
I heard through the grapevine that my paper was mentioned in a couple of other sessions, and I had some great discussions about the research with other members of the community over the course of the conference. It was also really great to see some friends from Michigan - I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with Lada, Libby, Sean, and a number of other people from SI. All in all, it was a really fantastic conference experience for me.
At least, it was up until I got back in to Syracuse - the airport is understaffed and it took 2 hours for the baggage to be unloaded. Although my bag was a carry-on, it was gate checked because the planes are so small that an ordinary carry-on doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment, and this time they unloaded gate-checked bags with the rest of the checked bags. Except that the last bags on, which were the first bags off, were also the last ones returned. So all the complaints I’ve been hearing about United seem to be well founded, and I’ll be avoiding them in the future. Getting in at midnight and having to wait until 2 AM before my carry-on bag was returned made me a rather unhappy customer.
That aside, everything has been going very well for me lately, for which good fortune I am truly thankful. Of course, all of that is due in no small part to plenty of effort on my end. I had a really good annual review just before the iConference, and the main thing I need to work on over the next year is writing, which is difficult at times but seems to be getting better lately. It’s a little intimidating to go up for review before 8 professors, but they were quite gentle and I got a lot of good tips for writing.
I also got news that I have a summer job as a research assistant working on some FLOSS project efforts, which is really great because it’s exactly what I would best like to be doing with my summer. I’ll be working on data management and analysis workflow development to support some of the research efforts on decision making and group maintenance, and will doubtless be working on some grantwriting as well. I’m very well motivated to lend a hand with grantwriting as I’d rather get my support from grant-funded research than general funds next year.
March 4th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Was it United or United Express? I seem to have had more problems with United Express
Congrats on the paper and successful presentation!
How was the iConference overall? Do you think it is the sort of thing industry folks (read alums) would be interested in or is it too academic?
Oh and congrats on the positive evaluation. I didn’t realize PhD programs did that.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:56 am
It was both United & United Express - though I guess the problem is United Express since that’s the service at Syracuse Hancock. I’m told that they don’t coordinate their service very well, either…
Thanks on the congrats - it was really great! Overall, the iConference was really good for me but hearing some others’ experiences, it sounds like the program was a bit uneven. At the moment, it seems a little on the academic/who-are-we side of things, but a number of the posters and topics presented could be of interest to industry folks. I would give it another couple of years to develop, but since so much of the iSchools’ work in general has a very practical focus, I think there’s good potential.
The annual evaluation is a Syracuse thing, as far as I can tell. I haven’t heard of other programs doing this, or at least not to this degree. It’s a very nice practice, intended to keep students on track as they progress to candidacy. It’s chaired by your advisor, you invite everyone you’ve had any involvement with in the last year (or more), and submit a lengthy document showing what you’ve been up to. My review document was 13 pages, plus the portfolio contents; in addition to a position statement, it included goals/plans/timeline for graduation, a summary of all graduate coursework, course-by-course descriptions of progress, detail about research and teaching involvement, and a short version of my CV.
In the evaluation session, the faculty review your progress and provide feedback and recommendations for future efforts; you also get to put your questions to them. One of my questions was what to do over the summer - which is how I found out that my summer is already taken care of, so to speak! When it’s all said and done, your advisor puts together a letter that goes in your permanent record to document the evaluation and set out your goals for the next year, and this provides the starting point for the next annual evaluation. It’s really a great mechanism and the personal attention from the faculty is both very valuable and quite remarkable. I’m really glad to have such strong mentorship and support from the faculty!