Research statements, recommendation letters, GREs. 'Tis the season again for grad school applications. To save all the kiddies from embarrassment and rejection (which typically implies you'll just end up making more money at some tech company), I decided to write a list of DOs and DON'Ts to follow when writing your application. Perhaps the sage readers will have more advice in the comments.
1. DON'T start your research statement with a quote from Albert Einstein. You may think that's a good idea, but so do the other 50% of the applicants. Hell, don't start it with any quote, unless it's from something like Gossip Girl. XOXO.
2. DON'T say you've wanted to be a professor since you were 4 years old. We won't believe you. When you were 4, you either wanted to be a policeman, an astronaut, or a firefighter. Admit it.
3. Computer Science is a field with many fads. Therefore, DON'T say you want to do research on genetic algorithms, or expert systems. Those are so 1980s. DO say you want to work on algorithmic game theory, cloud computing, or green computing.
4. DON'T have your recommenders write that you are "from a good family." Unless that family has a Turing Award or two, we don't care.
5. DON'T say you have a proof that P != NP and that you will only show it to us if we admit you. We may have admitted a guy like that once, but this mistake will not be repeated, so come up with your own gimmick.
6. DON'T start your statement with "respected sirs." There are women in the faculty too, you know.
7. DO mention the name of a professor that you want to work with, but make sure the professor is still alive.
8. DON'T have a "recommender loop" in which you write a recommendation letter for somebody that is writing a recommendation letter for you. At least make the cycle of longer length to confuse us a bit.
9. DO read over the version of the application that you submit to each school after doing a find-and-replace for the school name. Typos can creep up -- "I've always wanted to go to MIT, because the Barkeley faculty are the best."
XOXO.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Serious Damage to Health
So apparently this was run as an ad for Johnny Walker in Central America. I should ask them to pay me! (The other page had my name on it.) The best is what it says at the bottom: "Causes serious damage to health."
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Choosing a New Department Head
Our computer science department is currently in the process of choosing a new department head. Since we're academics, no decision can be simple so the faculty has come up with a complex procedure that may involve a committee, campaigning, multiple rounds of voting, a dance-off, and a conclave.
One of the steps is for every professor to write an essay saying what they think should be done to improve the department. Below is mine:
Dear Colleagues,
After careful analysis of the academic landscape, I am convinced the most important thing for Carnegie Mellon University is to build its social network. I believe our research, students and faculty are of the highest caliber, but I believe our social network lacks high-powered and famous individuals. Having such people associated with us will make our university more well-known and will grow our endowment. I propose a simple three-step plan to improve our connections:
1. Spend one year's worth of operating budget to buy a house in the Hamptons, where rich and influential people have homes. This one would do.
2. Force Ryan O'Donnell, Anupam Gupta, and Luis von Ahn to spend their summers there.
3. With their charm, these three professors would befriend all their high-powered neighbors and convince them that Carnegie Mellon is awesome.
I hope the next department head has the vision and audacity to carry out this fool-proof plan.
One of the steps is for every professor to write an essay saying what they think should be done to improve the department. Below is mine:
Dear Colleagues,
After careful analysis of the academic landscape, I am convinced the most important thing for Carnegie Mellon University is to build its social network. I believe our research, students and faculty are of the highest caliber, but I believe our social network lacks high-powered and famous individuals. Having such people associated with us will make our university more well-known and will grow our endowment. I propose a simple three-step plan to improve our connections:
1. Spend one year's worth of operating budget to buy a house in the Hamptons, where rich and influential people have homes. This one would do.
2. Force Ryan O'Donnell, Anupam Gupta, and Luis von Ahn to spend their summers there.
3. With their charm, these three professors would befriend all their high-powered neighbors and convince them that Carnegie Mellon is awesome.
I hope the next department head has the vision and audacity to carry out this fool-proof plan.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Email FAQs
1. Why has the frequency of your blog posts decreased?
I'm currently too busy to come up with anything intelligent to say :(
2. Will you review this paper for me?
See #1 above. I love you though.
3. Why are you so busy?
Yep... see #1.
I'm currently too busy to come up with anything intelligent to say :(
2. Will you review this paper for me?
See #1 above. I love you though.
3. Why are you so busy?
Yep... see #1.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Existential Questions and Utopian Salaries
I know this is impossible, but wouldn’t it be great if everybody was paid a salary proportional to how much they actually helped humanity? In my book, then, stock traders or hedge fund analysts would get smaller salaries than they do now -- sorry to all of my friends who have chosen the financial world; while I think you’re great people and some of you have helped individuals make some money, I think we all agree that most of you are not helping humanity out in proportion to your multi-million dollar salaries. On the other hand, farmers should be making bank -- no farmers, no food; no food = bad.
My question then is, if salaries worked this way, how much should scientists or professors be paid? More specifically, how much should computer science professors make? I became a professor in part because I wanted to help the world. But am I actually doing so? What does it mean to help the world? How do we measure this? Carnegie Mellon pays me a very healthy salary (although I wouldn’t mind a raise, boss), but I’d like to think that professors are underpaid compared to how much they would make in such a utopian system. It's not clear to me they are.
My question then is, if salaries worked this way, how much should scientists or professors be paid? More specifically, how much should computer science professors make? I became a professor in part because I wanted to help the world. But am I actually doing so? What does it mean to help the world? How do we measure this? Carnegie Mellon pays me a very healthy salary (although I wouldn’t mind a raise, boss), but I’d like to think that professors are underpaid compared to how much they would make in such a utopian system. It's not clear to me they are.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Hollywood-Style Lectures
Teaching is hard, and teaching well is REALLY hard. If you’ve never done it before, you have no idea how many hours of preparation each lecture takes. The trick to counter that is to teach the same class over and over. By the n-th time you teach it, you can get away with much less preparation, but even then some of the lectures truly suck.
I teach the same class every other semester: Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science. If you’re a CMU undergrad, you surely have strong memories about this class (positive or negative). If you’re not, all you need to know is that it’s a discrete math course required for all computer science majors and usually has about 200 students in it. When I spend millions of hours preparing for the class, it ends up being pretty good (teaching awards, very high student evaluations, etc.) Unfortunately, some weeks I don’t have millions of hours to spend on it so the lectures are not as good as I would want them to be (and the students fall asleep!). But let’s all be honest here: even when I prepare a lot, the lectures are not all that great. I make mistakes, I forget to say some things, my handwriting is bad, my jokes fall flat, etc. Every semester there are maybe 3-4 lectures that I am happy with afterwards, and of the rest about 50% totally suck in my mind and 50% are just barely passable. The fact that I am considered one of the better teachers of the department is, truthfully, sad.
So, a good fraction of my lectures totally suck. I am also quite tired of repeating almost the same thing over and over every semester (and what sucks more is that sometimes it comes out great and sometimes it doesn’t!). So here’s my proposal: instead of my amateurish attempts at making good lectures that fail most of the time, and instead of repeating the same crap every semester like a broken record, why don’t I just produce really good video lectures?
Now, I know what you will say: “Video lectures suck! They tend to put the students to sleep even more than real life professors, the audio quality is poor, you can’t see the board, etc.” And I agree. There is just something about being there in real life that cannot be captured by a video and this makes recorded lectures be even crappier than their real life counterparts.
But I’m not talking about simply recording myself giving a regular lecture. I think that would suck. I am talking about making a high production value movie for every lecture. I’m talking about professional script writers (those guys that make the Daily Show or the Colbert Report so funny), about special effects and computer graphics to illustrate the concepts instead of the board, about high end directors, cameramen, and producers (like the guys who made my Nova special).
I’ve spoken with some of my friends in the movie industry (writers, producers and directors of Hollywood blockbusters), and they all seem quite excited about trying to do this. The biggest problem seems to be the cost. It’s hard to estimate how much each lecture would cost, and it clearly depends on how much quality you want, but it seems each lecture can be done for between $75k to $300k. If we make 30 lectures to cover the whole semester, that amounts to something between $2 million and $9 million. This type of investment is probably not worth it for higher-level classes that are only taken by a few people each semester. But for a discrete math class taken by 200 students every semester at CMU alone (and tens of thousands of students throughout the world every year), I think it’s well worth it.
Thoughts?
I teach the same class every other semester: Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science. If you’re a CMU undergrad, you surely have strong memories about this class (positive or negative). If you’re not, all you need to know is that it’s a discrete math course required for all computer science majors and usually has about 200 students in it. When I spend millions of hours preparing for the class, it ends up being pretty good (teaching awards, very high student evaluations, etc.) Unfortunately, some weeks I don’t have millions of hours to spend on it so the lectures are not as good as I would want them to be (and the students fall asleep!). But let’s all be honest here: even when I prepare a lot, the lectures are not all that great. I make mistakes, I forget to say some things, my handwriting is bad, my jokes fall flat, etc. Every semester there are maybe 3-4 lectures that I am happy with afterwards, and of the rest about 50% totally suck in my mind and 50% are just barely passable. The fact that I am considered one of the better teachers of the department is, truthfully, sad.
So, a good fraction of my lectures totally suck. I am also quite tired of repeating almost the same thing over and over every semester (and what sucks more is that sometimes it comes out great and sometimes it doesn’t!). So here’s my proposal: instead of my amateurish attempts at making good lectures that fail most of the time, and instead of repeating the same crap every semester like a broken record, why don’t I just produce really good video lectures?
Now, I know what you will say: “Video lectures suck! They tend to put the students to sleep even more than real life professors, the audio quality is poor, you can’t see the board, etc.” And I agree. There is just something about being there in real life that cannot be captured by a video and this makes recorded lectures be even crappier than their real life counterparts.
But I’m not talking about simply recording myself giving a regular lecture. I think that would suck. I am talking about making a high production value movie for every lecture. I’m talking about professional script writers (those guys that make the Daily Show or the Colbert Report so funny), about special effects and computer graphics to illustrate the concepts instead of the board, about high end directors, cameramen, and producers (like the guys who made my Nova special).
I’ve spoken with some of my friends in the movie industry (writers, producers and directors of Hollywood blockbusters), and they all seem quite excited about trying to do this. The biggest problem seems to be the cost. It’s hard to estimate how much each lecture would cost, and it clearly depends on how much quality you want, but it seems each lecture can be done for between $75k to $300k. If we make 30 lectures to cover the whole semester, that amounts to something between $2 million and $9 million. This type of investment is probably not worth it for higher-level classes that are only taken by a few people each semester. But for a discrete math class taken by 200 students every semester at CMU alone (and tens of thousands of students throughout the world every year), I think it’s well worth it.
Thoughts?
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