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.
This post is going to be more personal essay than documenting views that can masquerade as advice. I am considering writing more posts in this style, as a representation of a particular time and place. Inspired by this series.
Talking about technical work — and research especially — is hard. When we say this, we often elide the why and as a result perpetuate the idea that there is something inherently difficult about computer science. This post is about a view I've long held, that computing is just as much about learning a dialect and culture as it is about the technical work we do.
I've been on and off Twitter for over a decade, and have recently decided to deactivate my personal account (@emmatosch) and transition over to using my professional account (@toschemma) exclusively, effective 1/12/20. This post walks through my rationale; it's less social media quit-lit and more of a reflection of how I need to update how I see me to be more in line with how others will see me in my new job.
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).