/txt/ How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia Pre-PhD and Post-PhD (& How to Give a Bad Talk) David Patterson UC Berkeley November 18, 2015
Acknowledgments & Related Work
- Many of these ideas came from (inspired by?) Tom Anderson, David Culler, Al Davis, Ken Goldberg, John Hennessy, Steve Johnson, John Ousterhout, Randy Katz, Bob Sproull, Carlo Séquin, Bill Tetzlaff, …
- Studs Terkel, Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. (1974) The New Press.
- “How to Give a Bad Talk” (1983), http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pattrsn/talks/BadTalk.pdf
- “How to Have a Bad Career” (1994), Keynote address, Operating Systems Design and Implementation Conf.
- Richard Hamming, “You and Your Research” (1995), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
- Ivan Sutherland, “Technology and Courage” (1996).
- “How the RAD Lab space came to be” (2007), https://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/space/history
- “Your Students are Your Legacy” (2009) Communications of the ACM 52.3: 30-33.
- “How to Build a Bad Research Center” (2014) Communications of the ACM 57.3: 33-36.
2
Outline
- Part I How to Have Bad Grad Student Career,and How to Avoid One
- Q&A
- Part II How to Have Bad Research Career
- Part III How to Avoid a Bad Research Career+ Richard Hamming (Turing Award for error-detecting and error-correcting codes) video clips from “You and Your Research” (1995)
- Q&A
- My Story: Accidental Academic (3 min)
- What Works for Me (3 min)
3
Part I: Commandments on
to Have a Bad Graduate Career
I. Concentrate on getting good grades
- – Postpone research involvement: might lower GPA
- – Aim for PhD class valedictorian!Alternative: Maintain reasonable grades– No employer cares about GPA » Sorry, no valedictorian
– Only once I gave below B in grad course
– 3 prelim courses only real grades that count
– What matters: Letters of recommendation
» From 3-4 faculty & external PhDs who have known you for 5+ years
4
five times a 