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).
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:
Everyone should have an elevator pitch about their research. When we start out, that pitch is very focused on a particular project, problem, or technique. As time passes, we form a more expansive research vision that can encompass new domains, related problems, and complementary techniques, but still ties everything together in a coherent philosophy, with a long-term goal. My pitch is: programming languages (PL) and software engineering (SE) form the methodological foundation for next-generation advancements in data-driven scientific inquiry. Just as scientific instruments made new experiments and discoveries possible, so too will new programming languages, systems, frameworks, and platforms.