All new postgrads in the CS department at Kent get an induction: some basic information about what facilities and people are available in the department, and some tips on how to end up with a PhD (or a Master's, depending). Here are some of my notes from the first session.
Future sessions will be on Tuesdays at 11AM in S110B. For next week, each research group's students should put together a 5-10 minute presentation about their group. (They were planning to do two per week, although looking at the distribution of research groups, I'm not sure how well that'll work...)
At the start, everybody introduced themselves and said briefly what they were working on. The first session included the following new students (in clockwise order round the table):
- Ed, ebc3, AII: finding out why artificial immune systems work.
- Patrick, pc52, AII: modelling the operation of the brain.
- Thomas, tpk1, AII: using artifical immune systems for computer security.
- Tom, tatd2, TCS: tracing in functional languages.
- Chris, cmb21, TCS: refactoring in functional languages.
- Nick, nh56, AII: swarm intelligence.
- Alex, ag84, AII: synthesising instruments based on descriptions of the sound.
- Myo, mta6, NDS: network intrusion detection systems.
- Allen, ac207, AII: data mining using swarm intelligence.
- Damien, djd20, SE: graphics for occam systems.
- Martyn, mt63, AII: graph visualisation.
- Adam (me), ats1, SE: occam operating system components.
- Paul, pa40, AII: artificial immune systems.
- Sebastien, sm244, TCS: garbage collection.
- Lukas, ls85, AII: Bayesian filtering for mobile applications.
Sally Fincher gave feedback on the descriptions as we went round the table, so they steadily got better the further we got. Some of the things that we concluded were useful in "what do you do?" descriptions:
- have a ten-second version, then a one-minute version, then a ten-minute version for people who're really interested
- make it accessible to non-CS people (Sebastien's garbage collection project is a good example here!)
- say where you're working
- say why it's interesting
- say who you're working with and why (if it's relevant)
- put your project in context
I think there are at least a couple of new postgrads who weren't able to make it. It didn't strike me until I worked out everybody's research group just now quite how many people are in AII compared to the other research groups.
Some book recommendations:
- "How To Get A PhD"
- "The Unwritten Rules Of PhD Research" (not as good on its own as the former, but a useful companion to it)
- "Networking On The Network"
- "Bugs In Writing"
- "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace"
A few questions to think about, with regards to doing a PhD, which provoked some interesting discussion about what people actually wanted:
- What do you want?
- How are you going to get it?
- How might you stop yourself?
- How will you know when you've got it?
The activity weekend this year will be 19th-21st November (Friday to sunday).