BU/CS-697 Home Page

Class Meetings:
   Place: MCS-135
    Time: Fri 10am-11am 

Cyberspace Coordinates:
     URL: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~best/crs/cs697
   Email: cs697@cs.bu.edu
          To add yourself type "csmail -a cs697" from your cs account

Overview

This required two-credit course is designed to help guide entering Ph.D. students through the challenging transition into the graduate program in Computer Science. Topics we will try to address range broadly across issues of research and scholarship, including:

Balancing competing demands of coursework, research, and teaching
How to go about identifying and working with a dissertation advisor
Working within a research group
Resolving conflicts with advisor and collaborators
Becoming a proficient reader, writer, and reviewer of technical papers
Making use of online and library research resources
Becoming proficient with technical tools of the trade for writing and performing research
Presenting good talks
Networking and becoming visible in the research community
Understanding the research funding landscape
Understanding and applying scientific ethics
Applying for fellowships and internships
Writing a thesis proposal and a dissertation
Finding a job after graduate school

The course will not cover details of program requirements and milestones, nor will the class provide academic advice specific to individual students in the class. For these please consult the Graduate Student Handbook and your academic advisor, respectively.

For more information, check the official course syllabus.

Schedule and Assigned Readings

+ Required Readings for Upcoming Class Meetings

The following are the required readings for each class meeting. Please note that the listing of a particular text doesn't mean that we agree with all, or even most, of what is in it. Our goal (and hope) is that these specific texts will stimulate discussion. Additional recommended references and readings are available below.

+ Materials from Past Class Meetings

May 2: Expressing Yourself Despite PowerPoint (Guests: Wayne Snyder and Leo Reyzin)
- Giving a Techichal Talk by Michael Ernst
- How to Give a Quals Practice Talk by Tessa Lau
- The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte (Handout)
- Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

April 18: Leveraging BU Library Resources (Guest: Paula Wasson)
- BU Library Resources

April 11: Whose Idea Is It? (Guests: John Byers, Mark Crovella, and Jorg Liebeherr)
- Whose Ideas Was It, by Caroyln Y. Johnson, The Boston Globe, March 1, 2005
- "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
April 4: On Academic Conduct
- Academic Conduct Survey by Gove Allen and Nicholas Ball
March 28: Tools of the Trade
- Latex, CVS, RCS, Citeseer, GoogleScholar, etc.
March 21: Writing Research Papers (Guest: Margrit Betke)
- On Writing CS Papers (Quiz) by Margrit Betke
- Book: (Online) Strunk, W., Elements of Style Strunk

February 29: A Day in the Life of a Faculty Member
- Talking points about academic life by Azer Bestavros

February 22: Presenting Research Work
- How to give a good research talk, by Simon Peyton Jones (video)
February 15: Reviewing Research Papers (Guest: Ibrahim Matta)
February 8: Reading Research Papers
- How to Read a CS Research Paper? by Philip Fong
- Thoughts on Reading Research Papers by Jeff Offutt
February 1: Choosing (and Managing the Relationship with) your Advisor
- The Grad Student-Advisor Relationship: Choosing an Advisor, Caltech
- Choosing your advisor, from Lance Fortnow's Computational Complexity blog, 2005
- Take your advisor's perspective, by Tara Kuther's Guide to Grad School
- Graduate Student Survival Guide by Wanda Pratt
January 25: On Being a Graduate Student in Computer Science
- So Long, and Thanks for the Ph.D.! (a.k.a. "Everything I wanted to know about CS graduate school at the beginning but didn't learn until later.") by Ronald Azuma
- Useful Things to Know About Ph. D. Thesis Research by H.T. Kung
- For anyone considering a Ph.D. in Computer Science by Doug Comer
January 18: Introduction
- Course Syllabus

Resources and References

The following is a comprehensive list of materials and references that have been collected over the many iterations of this class over the years. Feel free to suggest others to the instructors! The required readings for each class meeting are subsets of the references below.

On Being a Graduate Student