In August 2022, after almost two years as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer Science, I resigned from my position at the University of Vermont. This was not my preferred path, but something I felt I had to do in light of some family stressors and an increasingly untenable mismatch in values between me and my institution. Thus I joined my Millennial brethren in the Great Resignation.
The PhD is a professional degree and like all professional degrees, it prepares students for what are fundamentally jobs in communication. While the core of the work is technical — e.g., programming/coding, writing proofs, performing empirical analyses — that work is all for naught if you cannot communicate the fundamental insights and significance of your work to others.
This is why one of the things I always tells new graduate students is to write every day.
While I've mentored many students over the years,
I'm entering a new phase in my career where I will be officially advising graduate students. This post
is a first pass on what that means to me.
People who know me know that I am a huge proponent of treating academia
as work. However, we do not work in a system that is particularly
compatible with a modern notion of labor. The following advice attempts to
balance how things should work (i.e., compensating people on
the basis of their labor) with how they actually work (i.e., the reliance
on unpaid work that is high value but not valued highly).
Choosing the wrong forms of address is the fastest way to make a bad
impression over email. However, it is one based on norms and therefore
is not typically explicitly taught.
In the general case, we can capture how you should choose the form of
address via flow chart: