SteveOH

February 22, 2010

KLAS-TV Las Vegas, NV (9/10) reports that a recent study from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that “college grads are taking major hits to their high salary hopes.” According to the study, “the average starting salary for college grads this year was about $48,000,” a decline of “about $1,100″ from last year. Job offers are also down roughly 20 percent for college graduates. Meanwhile, “another survey highlights which college fields have the lowest-paying jobs.” These include “social work, special education, and elementary education.” A student interviewed as part of the article noted that engineering is one of the few fields that are seeing pay increases.

Labor Market Remains Tight. The Wall Street Journal (9/10, A2, Evans) reports that economic recovery notwithstanding, employment continues to lag. The Journal notes that the number of open positions reported by the Labor Department was 2.4 million, compared to the 2007 figure of 4.8 million jobs. The Journal also notes that the Federal Reserve beige book says “labor market conditions remain weak.”

The AP (9/10, Rugaber) reports, “Job openings fell to the lowest level in nine years in July…as businesses remain reluctant to hire despite signs the economy is improving.” Yet, “jobs are being added in some sectors, as companies seek more health care, technology and child care workers. The report underscores the tough competition that jobless Americans face.” The AP notes, “The report also adds to evidence that companies likely will wait until the economy is clearly recovering before hiring new employees. Many analysts believe the economy is likely to grow at a healthy 3% rate in the second half of this year, pulling the country out of the worst recession since the 1930s.” They worry, however, “that the growth will be difficult to sustain, particularly once government stimulus measures, such as the Cash for Clunkers program that ended last month, are no longer in effect.”

Wage Gap Smaller As High Paid Workers Lose Ground. The Wall Street Journal (9/10, A1, Davis, Frank) reports in a front-page story that during the current recession, the difference in income between top earners and those at the bottom has declined. Rather than indicating an improvement for lower-paid workers, the Journal notes that smaller wage gap is the result of declining compensation at the top of the labor market.

The guide below was not written by me, but by Ronald T. Azuma, PhD.  All credits go to the author and/or other stated sources.  I just wanted to share this wonderful resource with anyone that may be interested.

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Brief description

A computer science graduate school survival guide, intended for prospective or novice graduate students. This guide describes what I wish I had known at the start of graduate school but had to learn the hard way instead. It focuses on mental toughness and the skills a graduate student needs. The guide also discusses finding a job after completing the Ph.D. and points to many other related web pages.

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“So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!”

a.k.a.

“Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school
at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.”

The 4th guide in the Hitchhiker’s guide trilogy
(and if that doesn’t make sense, you obviously have not read Douglas Adams)

by Ronald T. Azuma

v. 1.08

Original version 1997, last revised January 2003

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Introduction

• The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
  1) Write down the problem.
  2) Think very hard.
  3) Write down the solution.

“To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.”
- Chinese proverbIn February 1995, on a beautiful sunny day with clear Carolina blue skies, I turned in the final, signed copy of my dissertation. The graduate school staff member did some last-minute checks on the document and pronounced it acceptable. After six and a half years of toil and sweat, I was finally done! While walking back to the C.S. department building, I was sorely disappointed that the heavens didn’t part, with trumpet-playing angels descending to announce this monumental occasion. Upon hearing this observation, Dr. Fred Brooks (one of my committee members) commented, “And the sad fact is, you’re no smarter today than you were yesterday.” “That’s true,” I replied, “but the important thing is that I am smarter than I was six and a half years ago.”

That day was over two years ago, and since then I have had plenty of time to reflect upon my graduate student career. One thought that has repeatedly struck me is how much easier graduate school might have been if somehow, magically, some of the things I knew when I turned in my dissertation I could have known when I first entered graduate school. Instead, I had to learn those the hard way. Of course, for many topics this is impossible: the point of graduate school is to learn those by going through the experience. However, I believe other lessons can be taught ahead of time. Unfortunately, such guidance is rarely offered. While I had to learn everything the hard way, new graduate students might benefit from my experiences and what I learned. That is the purpose of this guide.

Very little of this guide discusses technical matters. Technical skills, intelligence and creativity are certainly strong factors for success in graduate school. For example, I doubt there is a C.S. graduate student who didn’t at one point wish he or she had a stronger mathematical background. However, it’s beyond the scope of this guide to tell you how to be technically brilliant, as the following joke implies:

You don’t have to be a genius to do well in graduate school. You must be reasonably intelligent, but after a certain point, I think other traits become more important in determining success.This guide covers the character traits and social skills that often separate the “star” graduate students from the ordinary ones. Who are the students who are self-motivated, take initiative, find ways around obstacles, communicate well both orally and in writing, and get along well enough with their committee and other department members to marshal resources to their cause? Which students seem to know “how the system works” and manage to get things done? These traits are hardly unique to succeeding in graduate school; they are the same ones vital to success in academic or industrial careers, which is probably why many of the best graduate students that I knew were ones who had spent some time working before they came back to school.

This document is aimed at junior C.S. graduate students, but these observations are probably broad enough to apply to graduate education in other technical fields. My conclusions are certainly colored by my particular experiences (doing my dissertation work in interactive computer graphics in the Computer Science department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) but I think they are fairly general in application and should be of interest to readers at other schools and other C.S. specialties. Obviously, these are only my opinions and may not represent the views of other sane individuals or organizations. Some points may be controversial, but if they weren’t this would not be interesting reading. Parts of this document come from two informal talks I gave at UNC about “the Ph.D. job hunt” and “observations from spending one year in industrial research.” Both talks had larger audiences than any informal technical talk I gave at UNC, which told me that students are definitely interested in these subjects!

Why get a Ph.D.?

“Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the beginning you’re Dopey and Bashful. In the middle, you are usually sick (Sneezy), tired (Sleepy), and irritable (Grumpy). But at the end, they call you Doc, and then you’re Happy.”
- yours trulyThe most basic question every Ph.D. student must know the answer to is: “Why the hell am I doing this?”

It’s a good question. The hours are long. The pay is low, with minimal benefits. After graduation, Ph.D. salaries are higher than B.S. and M.S. salaries, but the difference doesn’t make up for the income lost by staying in school longer. The M.S. has a better “bucks for the time invested” ratio than the Ph.D. does. And in terms of social status, a graduate student doesn’t rank very high on the ladder.

If you do not have an acceptable answer to this question, then don’t get a Ph.D. I repeat: if you do not have a rock-solid reason for getting the Ph.D., then it is better that you leave with a Master’s.

Why? Completing a Ph.D. is a long, hard road with many potholes and washed out bridges along the way. You may run over some land mines and have to stop and turn around and explore other routes. If the goal is important enough to you, then these obstacles will not prevent you from completing your journey. But if you don’t know why you are on this road, then you will get discouraged and will probably leave without finishing, having wasted years of your life.

I faced this situation after the first time I took the Doctoral Written Exam (which at the time was the entrance examination into the Ph.D. program). I missed passing it by just 4 percentage points. I then had to decide whether or not to try again next semester (committing myself again to spending weeks getting ready for the test) or just leave with an M.S. degree.

I didn’t come to graduate school with the Ph.D. as the primary goal. So this test result forced me to answer the basic question “Why the hell am I doing this?” After much soul searching, I found my answer and decided to take the test again, passed it, and went on to get my Ph.D.

I got the Ph.D. because I wanted to get a research position after leaving graduate school. I wanted to work with the state of the art and extend it. I did not want to “bring yesterday’s technology one step closer to tomorrow.” I wanted a job that would I find interesting, challenging and stimulating. While an M.S. would give me a chance at landing a research position, the Ph.D. would give me a much better chance. And I did not want to live with regrets. If I took the Doctoral Written Exam again and failed again, then I could say that it wasn’t meant to be and move on with my life. I would have no regrets because I had given it my best shot and was not able to make it. However, if I left with an M.S. without taking the test a second time, and five years later I was in a job that was boring and uninteresting, then I would have to lie awake every night for the rest of my life wondering “What if?” What if I had taken the test again and passed? Would I then be in the job that I really wanted? That was not a situation I wanted to be in. I did not want to live the rest of my life regretting what might have been.

In hindsight, I think one of the main reasons I successfully completed the Ph.D. was the fact that I didn’t pass the exam on the first try. It’s ironic, but life sometimes works in strange ways. That initial failure caused me to answer the basic question, providing the mental fortitude to keep going despite the hurdles and problems I would later face.

My answer is you should get a Ph.D. if it is required for your goals after graduate school, such as becoming a professor or a researcher in academia, government or industry. Your answer may differ from mine. As long as you have an answer that you believe in passionately, then that’s enough. If you don’t have an answer, then save yourself a lot of grief and don’t get the Ph.D.

Academia is a business

“Remember the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules.”Academia is a business, and “graduate student” is a job title. This is especially true at private universities. Academia is very peculiar type of business. It is certainly not the Real World and does not work in the same way that the ordinary corporate world does. However, it is a business nonetheless and as a graduate student, you must treat it that way. Graduate school made a lot more sense and became much easier for me after I realized this. If you think of graduate school as an “Ivory Tower” free of politics, money problems, and real-world concerns, you are going to be severely disappointed. If you don’t believe me, read The Idea Factory by Pepper White (listed in the references) for one account of graduate life at MIT.

A few graduate students are independently wealthy or have fellowship and scholarship money that cover all their expenses for their total stay in graduate school. Such students are rare, however. Most of us needed financial support, in the form of Teaching Assistantships or Research Assistantships (RA’s). In general, RA’s are more desirable to students since those can directly fund the research you need to finish.

Where does the money come from to fund RA’s? Your professors have to raise funds from external organizations. These include government agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and others. Private companies also fund some university research, although this tends to be less common, in smaller amounts, and in the form of equipment donations. These organizations don’t just give money away as charity. They expect their money to accomplish something. Increasingly these days, this takes the form of a contract for a working demonstration that must be shown at the end. That means once the money is delivered, your professors must come through with the working demonstration. It is rare that they do this by themselves. Instead, they find some very capable, young, self-motivated people who are willing to work long hours for small amounts of pay. In other words, they fund RA’s.

The RA job is crucial to the academic business. If the RA’s cannot successfully conduct the research, then the demonstration will not work in the end and the funding agencies may not be happy. They may choose not to fund your professor in the future, which will bring his or her research program to a halt. And there are many professors and other researchers chasing too few research dollars these days; it is a competitive market. Thus, each professor wants the best students available. These students are the most capable ones who can get the research done required to fulfill the funding contracts.

That means you must treat an RA like a job. You must prove to your professors that you are capable of getting the work done, being a team player, communicating your results, and most of the other characteristics needed to do well in regular jobs. That’s why many of the upcoming sections in this guide sound like ones written for the regular workplace.

What do you get out of this? At the start, you may have to do tasks specifically related to the funding contracts. But eventually your professor must be flexible enough to fund your own specific research program that leads to the completion of your dissertation. Your stipend and tuition waiver should be enough to live on frugally without going into debt. You will learn the state of the art in your chosen speciality and conduct cutting-edge research on a subject that you find interesting and enjoyable. If you don’t find this compensation sufficient, then you shouldn’t be in graduate school in the first place.

The bottom line: realize that academia is a peculiar kind of business and the role you play in this enterprise. If you do your job well (and have good negotiation and interpersonal skills, as discussed in future sections), both your needs and your professors’ needs will be met. But don’t enter an RA position thinking that the computers, research equipment, staff members and other resources that you are provided with are your birthright. Don’t take them for granted! Most of those exist only because your professors have been able to raise the money to provide those to you. In turn, you must fulfill your end of the deal by doing great research with those resources. If you don’t do your job well, don’t be surprised if your professors choose not to fund you in the future. They do not have to provide you with an RA job or let you use the computing equipment they acquired. And the student who has no funding, no tuition reimbursement and no access to required computing resources is the student who leaves the university that semester.

How do you make sure you are one of those best, highly desired RA’s? Read on!

Graduate school is a different ballgame

“Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”
- Mark Twain“The IQ test was invented to predict academic performance, nothing else. If we wanted something that would predict life success, we’d have to invent another test completely.”
- Robert Zajonc

If you go through a Ph.D. program, you will find graduate school a very different world from undergraduate school. If you just get an M.S., then graduate school may not be much different from undergrad (depending on where you get your degree), except that the courses are deeper and more advanced. But for a Ph.D. student, graduate school is a whole new ballgame. The students who do well are the ones who learn this earlier rather than later and make the necessary adjustments.

Graduate school is not primarily about taking courses. You will take classes in the beginning but in your later years you probably won’t have any classes. People judge a recently graduated Ph.D. by his or her research, not by his or her class grades. And, without any offense to my professors, most of what you learn in a Ph.D. program comes outside of classes: from doing research on your own, attending conferences, and talking to your fellow students. Success in graduate school does not come from completing a set number of course units but rather from successfully completing a research program.

Graduate school is more like an apprenticeship where each student has his or her own project, and the masters may or may not be particularly helpful. It’s like teaching swimming by tossing students into the deep end of the pool and seeing who makes it to the other end alive and who drowns. It’s like training clock designers by locking students inside a clock factory with some working clocks and lots of clock parts and machines for building clocks. However, the instructions are at best incomplete and even the masters themselves don’t know exactly how to build next year’s models.

Excelling in a Ph.D. program requires different skills than doing well in undergrad. Undergraduate education tests you through class projects (that do not last more than a semester), essays, midterms and finals. For the most part, you work alone. Your professor may not know your name. Every other student in your class takes the same tests or does similar projects. But in a Ph.D. program, you must select and complete a unique long-term research program. For most of us, this means you have to learn how to do research and all that entails: working closely with your professors, staff and fellow students, communicating results, finding your way around obstacles, dealing with politics, etc.

I’m not saying that tests and grades are completely unimportant in graduate school. One of the two biggest hurdles in completing a Ph.D. is passing the qualifying exam. (The other is finding an acceptable dissertation topic.) But because graduate school is not nearly as exam-based as undergraduate education and requires different skills, the GRE and undergraduate grades are not as good an indicator of who will excel and who will drop out as admission committees seem to think. Those tests do not measure creativity, tenacity, interpersonal skills, oral presentation skills, and many other important traits.

The next several sections discuss these traits.

Initiative

“The difference between people who exercise initiative and those who don’t is literally the difference between night and day. I’m not talking about a 25 to 50 percent difference in effectiveness; I’m talking about a 5000-plus percent difference, particularly if they are smart, aware, and sensitive to others.”
- Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective PeopleThe dissertation represents a focused, personal research effort where you take the lead on your own, unique project. If you expect that your adviser is going to hold your hands and tell you what to do every step of the way, you are missing the point of the dissertation. Ph.D. students must show initiative to successfully complete the dissertation. This does not mean that guidance from professors is unimportant, just that this guidance should be at a reasonably high level, not at a micromanaging level. If you never do any tasks except those that your professor specifically tells you to do, then you need to work on initiative.

At UNC, there is a famous anecdote about a former UNC graduate student named Joe Capowski. Many years ago, UNC got a force-feedback mechanical arm to use with molecular visualization and docking experiments. The problem was how to move it to UNC. This mechanical arm is a large, heavy beast, and it was in Argonne National Labs in Chicago, IL. Unfortunately, there was a trucker’s strike going on at the time. Joe Capowski, on his own initiative (and without telling anyone), flew out to Argonne, rented a car, drove the mechanical arm all the way back to North Carolina, and then handed the computer science department the bill! Many years later, Joe Capowski ran for the Chapel Hill city council and won a seat. Prof. Fred Brooks gave him an endorsement. I still remember the words Dr. Brooks said: “I may not agree with his politics, but I know he’ll get things done.”

While the Joe Capowski anecdote is perhaps a bit extreme, it does show that it is often better to ask forgiveness than permission, provided you are not becoming a “loose cannon.” Certain universities (e.g. MIT) are good at fostering a “can do” attitude among their graduate students, and therefore they become more assertive and productive. One of the hallmarks of a senior graduate student is that he or she knows the types of tasks that require permission and those that don’t. That knowledge will come with experience. Generally, it’s the senior graduate students who have the most freedom to take initiative on projects. This privilege has to be earned. The more that you have proven that you can work independently and initiate and complete appropriate tasks, the more your professors will leave you alone to do what you want to do.

Tenacity

“Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.”
- Louis PasteurYou don’t need to be a genius to earn a Ph.D. (although it doesn’t hurt). But nobody finishes a dissertation without being tenacious. A dissertation usually takes a few years to complete. This can be a culture shock to former undergraduates who have never worked on a project that lasted longer than one quarter or semester (at the end of which, whatever the state of the project, one declares victory and then goes home). No one can tell you in advance exactly how long the dissertation will take, so it’s hard to see where the “end of the road” lies. You will encounter unexpected problems and obstacles that can add months or years to the project. It’s very easy to become depressed and unmotivated about going on. If you are not tenacious about working on the dissertation, you won’t finish.

Tenacity means sticking with things even when you get depressed or when things aren’t going well. For example, I did not enjoy my first year of graduate school. I didn’t tell anyone this until after leaving UNC. I was not on a project and was focused on taking classes, some of which I didn’t do all that well in. I didn’t feel a part of the Department, and really wondered whether or not I fit in. Still, I stuck with it and when summer rolled around and I got a job in the Department, I became much more involved in research and enjoyed graduate school much more. Part of earning a Ph.D. is building a “thick skin” so you are not so fragile that you will give up at the first sign on any difficulties.

One lesson I learned as a graduate student is the best way to finish the dissertation is to do something every day that gets you closer to being done. If all you have left is writing, then write part of the dissertation every day. If you still have research to do, then do part of it every day. Don’t just do it when you are “in the mood” or feeling productive. This level of discipline will keep you going through the good times and the bad and will ensure that you finish.

Flexibility

“Back in graduate school, I’d learned how to survive without funding, power, or even office space. Grad students are lowest in the academic hierarchy, and so they have to squeeze resources from between the cracks. When you’re last on the list for telescope time, you make your observations by hanging around the mountaintop, waiting for a slice of time between other observers. When you need an electronic gizmo in the lab, you borrow it in the evening, use it all night, and return it before anyone notices. I didn’t learn much about planetary physics, but weaseling came naturally.”
- Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo’s Egg“The Chinese call luck opportunity and they say it knocks every day on your door. Some people hear it; some do not. It’s not enough to hear opportunity knock. You must let him in, greet him, make friends and work together.”
- Bernard Gittelson

Flexibility means taking advantage of opportunities and synergies, working around problems, and being willing to change plans as required. As a graduate student, you are on the bottom of the academic totem pole. Even undergraduates can rank higher, especially at private universities (because they actually pay tuition!) You cannot order anybody to do anything. In general, you will be in the position of reacting to big events rather than controlling them. Therefore, you must be flexible in your approach and research program.

For example, you may not have as much access to a piece of laboratory equipment as you would like, or maybe access is suddenly cut off due to events beyond your control. What do you do? Can you find a replacement? Or reduce the time needed on that equipment? Or come in at odd hours when no normal person uses that equipment? Or redefine the direction of your project so that equipment is no longer required?

Events can be good as well as bad. The difference between the highly effective graduate student and the average one is that the former recognizes those opportunities and takes advantage of them. I had nothing to do with bringing Gary Bishop to UNC. But after he arrived I realized my research would progress much faster if he became my adviser so I made the switch and that was a big help to my graduate student career. Opportunities for synergy and serendipity do occur, but one has to be flexible enough to recognize them and take advantage of them.

Interpersonal skills

• I first learned of the capricious, human side of organizations some 15 years ago while studying the careers of engineers and scientists. The research design required that I spend eight hours a day in one-on-one interviews. For two hours I’d ask “career” questions of an engineer, chemist, physicist, or applied mathematician — all of whom worked for a Fortune 500 firm. During these 120 minutes, the subjects talked about the perils of the organizations. Two hours was scarcely enough time to share their stories. All energetically discussed their personal careers. Most had been frustrated with the “soft and gushy” side of organizations. Some had figured out the system and learned to master it. Others had not.As part of the research design, we asked to talk to low, medium, and high performers. This in itself was an interesting exercise. To determine performance rankings, we would place in front of a senior manager the names of the 10-50 people within his or her organization. Each name would be typed neatly in the middle of a three-by-five card. After asking the manager to rank the employees from top to bottom, the managers would then go through a card sort. Typically the executive would sort the names into three or four piles and then resort each pile again. Whatever the strategy, the exercise usually took only minutes. Just like that, the individual in charge of the professionals in question was able to rank, from top to bottom, as many as 50 people. It rarely took more than three minutes and a couple of head scratches and grunts. Three minutes. Although politics may appear ambiguous to those on the receiving end, those at the top were able to judge performance with crystal clarity.

  This performance ranking (conducted by individuals not involved in the interviews) was then used as a dependent measure. Those of us conducting the interviews attempted to surface information (independent measures) that would predict the ranking. What about a scientist’s career would lead to a top ranking? What trashed a perfectly good career? Surely scientific prowess would have an impact. And it did.

  But technological prowess wasn’t as predictive as another factor. We discovered that we could tell what performance group the interviewees belonged to within a minute or two by their attitudes toward people and politics. Individuals who were ranked low by their managers spoke of organizational politics as if it were poison. They were exceptionally annoyed by the people side of the business. They frequently stated they would rather be left alone to conduct their research untrammeled by human emotions. They characterized the social side of organizations as “soft and gushy.” They sounded like Spock turned bitter.

  Top performers, in contrast, found a way to work within the political system. They hadn’t exactly embraced politics. They didn’t appear like that toothy kid you knew back in college who lived to fight political battles. They didn’t come off as glad-handling sales folks. These were professional scientists who were often top ranked in their field. They looked and talked liked scientists. The difference between them and those ranked at the bottom of the totem pole was clear. They had found a way to make peace with organizations, people, and politics. They climbed to the top of their field by mastering both hard things and soft and gushy people.

  Engineers and scientists aren’t the only ones who find the human side of the organizations to be annoying. As we expanded our research to include professors, accountants, and other professionals, the findings were remarkably similar. All found political machinations to be distasteful. It’s just that some had found a way to master the social aspects — the top performers.

“For humans, honesty is a matter of degree. Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That’s why it’s a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can’t handle the truth.”
- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle“I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”
- Isaac Newton

Computer Science majors are not, in general, known for their interpersonal skills. Some of us got into this field because it is easier to understand machines than people. As frustrating as computers can be, they at least behave in a logical manner, while human beings often do not. However, your success in graduate school and beyond depends a great deal upon your ability to build and maintain interpersonal relationships with your adviser, your committee, your research and support staff and your fellow students. This does not mean you must become the “life of the party.” I am not and never will be a gregarious, extroverted person. But I did make a serious effort to learn and practice interpersonal skills, and those were crucial to my graduate student career and my current industrial research position.

Why should this matter, you may ask? If one is technically brilliant, shouldn’t that be all that counts? The answer is no, because the situation is different from your undergraduate days. In both graduate school and in business, you must depend upon and work with other people to achieve your goals To put this in perspective, I have excerpted the following from an article called “Organizations: The Soft and Gushy Side” by Kerry J. Patterson, published in Fall 1991 issue of The Bent:

Students usually look down on politics, but politics in its most basic, positive form is simply the art of getting things done. Politics is mostly about who is allowed to do what and who gets the resources (money, people, equipment, etc.) To succeed in your research, you will need resources, both capital and personnel. Interpersonal skills are mandatory for acquiring those resources. If you are incapable of working with certain people or make them mad at you, you will not get those resources and will not complete your research.For example, which group of people did I try my best to avoid offending? Was it my committee? No, because healthy disagreements and negotiations with your adviser and committee are crucial to graduating within a reasonable amount of time. Nor was it my fellow students, because I did not need help from most of them, and most of them did not need me. The critical group was the research and support staff. These include the research faculty and all the various support positions (the system administrators, network administrators, audio-visual experts, electronic services, optical and mechanical engineers, and especially the secretaries). I needed their help to get my research done, but they did not directly need me. Consequently, I made it a priority to establish and maintain good working relationships with them.

Cultivating interpersonal relationships is mostly about treating people with respect and determining their different working styles. Give credit where credit is due. Acknowledge and thank them for their help. Return favors. Respect their expertise, advice and time. Apologize if you are at fault. Realize that different people work in different ways and are motivated by different things — the more you understand this diversity, the better you will be able to interact and motivate them to help you. For certain people, offering to buy them dinner or giving them free basketball tickets can work wonders.

A true example: at one point in my research, I needed to make significant modifications to some low-level code in the graphics computer called “Pixel Planes 5.” Doing this required expertise that I did not have, but another graduate student named Marc Olano did. How should I tap into Marc’s expertise and get my necessary changes done?

The wrong way is to go up to Marc, explain the problem, and get him to make the changes. Marc doesn’t need the changes done; I do. Therefore, I should do most of the work. Expecting him to do the work shows disrespect of his time.

What I actually did was to explain the problem to Marc and he sketched out a possible solution. Then I ran off and worked on my own for a few days, trying to implement the solution. I got part of it working, but ended up getting stuck on another part. Only at that point did I go back to Marc and ask him for help. By doing this, I showed that I respected his time and wanted to minimize his burden, thus making him more willing to help me. Months later, when he and Jon Cohen needed my help in setting up a system to demonstrate some of their software, I was more than happy to return the favor.

Interpersonal interaction is a huge subject and goes far beyond my description here. All I can really do in this section is (hopefully) convince you that these skills are vital to your graduate student career and encourage you to learn more if you need to improve these skills. I still have a lot to learn myself. I recommend reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Type Talk (both listed in the References section) as starting points.  The magazine article “How to be a star engineer” (listed in the References) also touches on this subject.

Organizational skills

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”Since academia is a type of business, you will have responsibilities that you must uphold. You will be asked to greet and talk with visitors, give demos, show up to meetings, get projects done on time, etc. If you are not well organized, you will have a difficult time meeting those obligations. A technically brilliant student will be greatly hampered if he or she exhibits an “absent minded” personality and develops a reputation for being disorganized.

There are many different time management and organization skills, and you can find many books on those at your local bookstore. This guide is not going to describe them. Find one that works for you and use it. I can highly recommend Stephen Covey’s book, listed in the references. But whatever system you pick, just make sure it works for you. I have never found anyone else who uses my filing scheme, but it is effective for me (by minimizing the combined time of putting away and locating a piece of information). All that really matters is whether or not it works.

One metaphor I found useful is the following: Organize your tasks as if you were juggling them. Juggling several balls requires planning and skill. You must grab and toss each ball before it hits the ground. You can only toss one ball at a time, just as you can only work on one task at a time. The order in which you toss the balls is crucial, much as the order of working on tasks often determines whether or not you meet all your deadlines. Finally, once you start a task (grab a ball) you want to get enough done so you can ignore it for a while (throw it high enough in the air so it won’t come down for a while). Otherwise you waste too much time in context switches between tasks. Do you see jugglers try to keep each ball at the same height above the ground, frantically touching every ball every second?

Randy Pausch (a professor at CMU) has a set of notes on time management. Three words in his guide summarize the most vital step: Kill your television. He asks you to keep your priorities straight. What is the most important thing to a Ph.D. student? It should be finishing the dissertation, not watching every episode of Friends. That doesn’t mean dropping everything else in life, but it does mean knowing what takes priority and allocating time accordingly.

Communications skills

“What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.”
- Samuel Johnson“Present to inform, not to impress; if you inform, you will impress. “
- Fred Brooks

I am always amazed that articles written about businesses consistently put good communication skills at or near the top of list of skills that employers want to see in people but rarely find. But you know what? It’s true!

Communication skills, both written and oral, are vital for making a good impression as a Ph.D. student and as a researcher. At a minimum, you have to defend your dissertation with an oral presentation. But you should also expect to write technical papers and reports, give presentations at conferences, and give demonstrations to groups of visitors. If you can write and speak well, you will earn recognition and distinguish yourself from the other graduate students. This is especially true when giving presentations in front of important visitors or at major conferences.

Conversely, if you cannot communicate well, then your career options after graduation will be limited.  Professors spend most of their time communicating: teaching, fundraising, guiding graduate students, and documenting their results (through papers, videos, viewgraphs, etc.)  In industry, we need people who can communicate well so they can work in teams, learn what businesses and customers need, present their results, raise funds, and transition to leadership roles in projects and personnel management.  If you are technically brilliant but are incapable of communicating, then your results will be limited to what you can accomplish alone and your career growth will be limited, both in industry and academia.

Unfortunately, not all graduate students receive training in giving presentations or writing technical documents (which are different from English essays). These are skills that can be learned! Don’t worry if giving presentations and writing papers are not something that comes naturally to you. I was not very comfortable giving oral presentations when I started graduate school, so I made a concerted effort to learn how to do so, by taking classes, reading about the subject, and practicing. It’s not easy, but it’s well worth the investment. If you need practice, try giving informal talks at research luncheons, joining Toastmasters, and studying good speakers to see what they do.

Covering everything about this subject would fill a guide by itself (check out the SIGGRAPH page on preparing and giving presentations), and would probably better done through a videotape than a written document. But here are a few basic points:

• Organization counts. Within the first few paragraphs or first few minutes, tell me why I should read your paper or listen to your talk. Make it clear where we are going and what we have already covered.
• Make the text in your slides large enough so that people sitting in the back can read them. For large presentation halls, this usually means no more than 6-7 lines per slide and 28 point type minimum. You’d be surprised how many experts on visualization (especially tenured professors!) give presentations with unreadable slides.
• Variety retains interest. Vary your pace, tone, and volume. Emphasize the important points. Look around the room. Throw in some video, pictures, or live examples.
• Don’t stand in front of the screen and block everyone’s view. You’d be surprised how often people do this without realizing it.
• Point out the limitations of your work. That helps your credibility. Similarly, give credit where credit is due.
• Make friends with the A/V crew! Running A/V is a thankless, negative reinforcement job. If everything runs smoothly, well, that’s what was supposed to happen so nobody says anything. But if anything goes wrong, the entire audience looks back at the control room. Help the A/V people help you. Always check in early and test the equipment. Tell them what you are going to do in your presentation (e.g. I’m running 3 video segments). Make sure you know how everything works long before you come up to the podium. And thank the A/V crew for their help after you are done!

Confidence is the key to giving a good presentation. And the way to gain confidence is to give good presentations. When you’re just starting out, this is a Catch-22. However, once you become good enough, this turns into a positive feedback cycle that can make giving talks a pleasure.

Writing papers and getting them published is vital for Ph.D. students who want to get jobs in research after graduation. Your ability to write well significantly improves the chances that your paper will be accepted. When I was a young graduate student and read a paper that I didn’t understand, I thought “Gee, I must be dumb.” Today I will read the same paper and think “Boy, this is a lousy paper. The authors did not do a good job explaining and presenting their work.” If I am reviewing that paper, such a reaction is enough for me to reject the paper.

Where do you submit your papers? Your professors will help you with this choice, but in general I would suggest shooting for the best conferences or journals where you think it has a reasonable chance of being accepted. It’s not much more work to write, submit and present a paper in a highly respected venue than in less respected venues. And if you don’t shoot for the top you’ll never know if it would have made it. The field of computer graphics is a bit unusual in that the most desirable place to publish is a conference (SIGGRAPH), rather than a journal. Be aware that journals can take years to publish submitted papers; the turn-around time is much faster in a conference.

Finally, don’t forget to communicate with your professors and your teammates. Keep your committee appraised of your progress. One thing I do (which few others do) is write short (1 screenfull) status reports, which I religiously e-mailed to my professors and team members on a weekly basis. These serve as an efficient way of keeping everyone up to date on what I’m doing. They are also a good way for me to record my progress. If I need to remember what I got done during a six month period, I have plenty of old status reports that I can read. You’d be amazed how appreciative professors and managers are of this simple practice. I also throw in a different humorous quote at the end of each week’s report to reward people for reading it.

When you are working in the lab and you reach a milestone or achieve a result, let people know about it! Bring in your professors and fellow students and show it off! That’s a win-win situation. It lets others know that you are making progress and achieving results, and you get valuable feedback and advice.

Choosing an adviser and a committee

“Some students in the lab are only nominally supervised by a thesis advisor. This can work out well for people who are independent self-starters. It has the advantage that you have only your own neuroses to deal with, not your advisor’s as well.”
- from “How to do research at the MIT AI Lab”The choice of an appropriate adviser is crucial to successfully completing the Ph.D. Your adviser must be someone who can cover your area of specialization and someone you can get along with. When I started graduate school, I thought the adviser – student relationship was supposed to be very close, both professionally and socially. In reality, the relationship is whatever the professor and the student choose to make of it. It can be close, with invited dinners at the professor’s home, or it can be distant, e.g. meeting once per semester just to remind the professor that the student is still alive.

One basic question in choosing an adviser is whether to pick a junior (non-tenured) or a senior (tenured) professor. Non-tenured professors tend to travel less and are generally more available. It is difficult to get help from an adviser who is never in town. Non-tenured faculty have fewer advisees that you have to compete with to get time with the professor. They are more likely to be personally involved with your research — writing code, spending time in the lab at midnight, etc. Non-tenured faculty must be energetic and hard working if they want to be awarded tenure, and this work habit can rub off on their students. However, tenured faculty have several advantages as well. They are usually the ones with most of the money and resources to support you. They do not have to compete with their students for publications and recognition. The advisee does not run the risk of having his or her adviser not getting tenure and leaving the university. Tenured faculty are more experienced with “how the game works” and thus may be better sources of guidance, personal contacts, jobs after graduation, etc.

I ended up with a non-tenured professor (actually, he was not even on the tenure track at the time) as my adviser, but also put several tenured professors on my committee, including some of the most senior ones in my specialty. In that way, I got the best of both worlds: the day-to-day attention from the primary adviser, combined with the resources and experience of the committee.

Professors develop reputations amongst graduate students. Some are known to graduate their Ph.D. students rapidly. Others are impossible to get hold of, so their students take forever to finish or leave without graduating. Some dictate what their advisees have to do, while others are accommodating of student interests. Ask around. What you learn may be revealing. And if circumstances change to make another professor a more appropriate match to your needs, don’t be afraid to switch if that is an overall win.

When picking a committee, you want to make sure they can cover all the areas of your thesis. You also want to make sure that it is likely that all the committee members will be available for meetings! Including too many professors who travel often will make it difficult to get all five or six together in one room for a three hour oral exam or proposal meeting. When scheduling such meetings, start by finding times when the difficult-to-reach professors are in town, and then add in the other committee members.

Balance and Perspective

“Life goes by so fast, that if you don’t stop and look around, you might miss it.”
- from the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off“Generally speaking, people provide better maintenance for their cars than for their own bodies.”
- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future

When I was in graduate school, my top priority was crystal clear to me: getting out with a Ph.D. Other people described me as “focused like a laser beam” on that goal. In retrospect, I may have been too focused. There is more to life than graduate work. Keeping your health and your sanity intact are both vital to achieving the primary goal of getting out.

Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) is a major occupational hazard in our industry. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is just one type of RSI. If you do not know how to set up your workspace for good ergonomics, learn now! The Pascarelli reference at the end of this guide is a good book on this subject. Over a dozen of my friends and coworkers have been inflicted with this problem. In severe cases, RSI can be a career-ending injury. If you can’t type, it’s rather difficult to write papers, computer programs, presentations, etc. Don’t let this happen to you! Prevention is the way to go. Recently I have been working with weights to strengthen my shoulders and wrists as an additional preventative step.

Earning a Ph.D. is like running a marathon. You have to learn to pace yourself and take care of your body if you want to reach the finish line. Unfortunately, students often act like sprinters running a marathon. They are highly productive for a while, but then fall by the wayside because they aren’t eating correctly, exercising, taking time out to recharge their batteries, etc. You maximize your long-term productivity by not ignoring those other aspects. While I was in graduate school, I took time out to travel up and down the East Coast, from Boston down to Orlando. That was an important part of keeping my stress down and recharging my batteries. I also did some running and circuit training for exercise. For shorter breaks, I shot nerf basketballs at a tiny hoop mounted in the graphics lab and kept a guitar in my office. Figure out what works for you.

It’s easy to lose perspective while in graduate school. You are surrounded by so many other smart, hard working people that it is easy to feel inferior and lose self-esteem and confidence. But without an underlying confidence that you do have what it takes to complete a dissertation, it’s too easy to drop out when the going gets tough instead of sticking it through. I found it useful to keep in touch with the “real world,” to remind myself that the graduate student population is not representative of humanity in general and to keep my perspective. You got into graduate school because you have already shown to your professors that you have potential and skills that are not typical among most college students, let alone most people — don’t forget that.

The Ph.D. job hunt

On résumés: “The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.”
- Stanley RandallReal World, The (n.): Where a computer science student goes after graduation; used pejoratively (“Poor slob, he got his degree and had to go out into the REAL WORLD.”). Among programmers, discussing someone in residence there is not unlike talking about a deceased person.”
- the fortune program

Ideally, the job hunt begins years before you graduate. Networking is very important: while you are in the middle to late phases of your graduate studies, try to get yourself noticed by professors and industry people at other sites. One way to do this is to offer to give a talk about your work at another site. This is not that difficult to do, since most research places love to host seminars and bring in fresh ideas. Attending conferences and working elsewhere during the summer are other ways to get exposure. Make friends with graduate students and personnel at other schools. Make and carry your own business cards. Schmooze with important visitors during major site visits. For about two years, I ran the informal “Graphics Lunch” symposia at UNC. That means I was the point of contact for many speakers who visited UNC and that helped me make contacts. There is also a “star” system that exists. Certain outstanding graduate students can get labeled as “stars” by their professors and that can be an enormous help in getting an interview at CMU or other prestigious locations. It’s nice if you can get on that track but one shouldn’t rely upon it!

Networking is important because many jobs are found and filled that way. I got my position at HRL partially because I visited there, at my own expense, two years before I even started my job hunt. That meant that when I circulated my résumé, I was more than just a piece of paper to them. You are not going to be looking for job ads in the newspaper. Instead, you’ll look for announcements in major journals, at conferences, on the Net, and through your contacts. For industrial positions, it is crucial to get past the Human Resources department and find the individual with the ability to hire and deal with that person directly.

When do you start asking for interviews? You can start when you are able to give a talk about your dissertation work. Don’t be too early or too late, because you only get one chance per site. Academic positions generally have a particular “season” (much like getting admitted to school) that starts in the Fall and ends around April; industrial positions generally don’t follow that. The job hunt and interviewing process can take months; factor that into your time allocation.

The job supply and demand situation can vary dramatically in a few years, and anything I say here about how strong the job market is today (Jan. 2003) will likely be out of date by the time you read it.  For example, during the time I was job hunting (end of 1994 to early 1995), good positions were not easy to find. If I had a dollar for every site that told me “We don’t have a permanent position, but would you take a postdoc?” I could buy a lot of lunches. However, around 1997 the graphics job market became very strong, with many individuals getting multiple offers with high salaries. 1998 was an excellent year for people looking for tenure-track graphics faculty positions. I know many friends who found good tenure-track positions that year.  So when I revised the guide in 2000, I said the job market was strong with high demand. Of course, the tech industry went downhill at that point and hasn’t recovered yet. Now it is much more difficult to find research positions in industry or academia.  With luck, the market will be much better at the time you read this.

Before starting the job hunt, determine your goals and parameters in advance and the “angle” you will take to sell yourself. For example, my strength was in systems, so I chose to emphasize that in my cover letters. Customize your approach to each site, if time permits. What you do for your thesis determines who will and who won’t take a look at you. Try to get at least one reference from outside your university.

This guide is not going to cover the basics of interviewing; you can get that from many books (e.g. the Martin Yate and Bob Weinstein books listed in the references). However, I will mention some tips. Don’t interview on the day of arrival, and try to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Be prepared for hard or illegal questions, but you probably won’t get them. Do your homework on each site before interviewing! It continually amazes me that people show up for interviews without knowing anything about the institution they want to join. If the target is a research lab for a major company, you can easily find Wall St. Journal articles, annual reports and stockbroker reports in your library. If your goal is an academic position, check out the Tomorrow’s Professor site for guidance.  If you interview at a university, get their course catalog and use their numbering scheme to describe the courses you can teach. Interview to find out more about them, not just to sell yourself. Your 45-60 minute research presentation is crucial; make sure you practice it thoroughly. Interviews create interviews. That is, if you’ve already gone on many interviews at other places, then that makes you appear more desirable since others want you, and that makes it easier for you to get more interviews. Broadcast this fact by keeping your interview schedule on your web page. There is an anecdote about one student who received offers to interview at many different places, but only after Stanford interviewed him! Keep logs on who you talk to, what you talked about, and when. That makes it easier to keep things straight when juggling several contenders. The major conferences in your field are a good place to schedule preliminary interviews to get your foot in the door, because it is cheap for the company or university. The people you need to meet are already there, so that saves them the expense of having to fly you out and house you at their site.

Offers are a waiting game. Be prepared for lots of frustration. You need a written offer or nothing is official; you should also accept or reject in writing. Negotiate, but be aware of the strength or weakness of your position. Starting salary may not be as important as the type of work, benefits, and growth potential. Drug tests and other factors are becoming more common; you will have to decide how you want to respond to those.

Ah yes, salaries. Everybody wants to know about those. For academic (tenure track) salaries, you can get typical numbers from the annual Taulbee surveys, printed in the Computing Research News newsletter and the Communications of the ACM. Realize that these are 9-month salaries. Whether or not you can procure funding that covers 2 or 3 months of summer salary makes a big difference to your bottom line. Also, professors can make money by consulting at rates of $1000-2500 per day, although this is more common among established professors. Figures for industrial salaries are harder to come by. The Maisel and Gaddy references are the only ones I have found that specifically surveys young Ph.D.’s in industry (also see the chart a few paragraphs down). Salaries depend heavily on geography. Silicon Valley is in a league of its own, with salaries far above any other region. But before you decide to move to Palo Alto, remember that the cost of living there is also in the stratosphere. In Sept. 1997, a $60k salary in Indianapolis bought the same standard of living as a $101k salary in San Jose! The cost of living difference is larger today.  Decent houses in the Silicon Valley cost more than half a million.  More general computer science salary surveys are run by the IEEE and EE Times, available at the JobStar salary survey site.

Acquire salary information on your own by making use of your network. Don’t ask for someone’s salary directly, unless it’s someone you know very well and even then be very careful. Instead, bounce figures off people and see how they respond. Do they think the figure you mention is high, low, or about right? By seeing how people respond you can get an idea of what the market range is.

Factor in benefits and the expected workload into your compensation evaluation. That $100k offer may seem less attractive if you have to work 80 hour weeks in that position.  Traditionally, stock options made up a large fraction of the compensation packages for startups and Silicon Valley positions, but with the tech bust that may no longer be the case.

The type of work and compensation varies dramatically with the types of positions. Academic positions are tenure-track, research staff (non tenured) and postdocs. Tenure-track positions at major universities are fairly hard to come by; you need to be both good and lucky. Read the Feibelman and Ralston references for more details. The tenure-track also requires a lot of hours and dedication. As Randy Pausch put it, tenure is a competitive process where you get compared with the other assistant professors and the already-tenured professors. If they worked 70 hour weeks for six years to get tenure, don’t expect to get away with working 40 hour weeks. Postdocs are low paying but good for padding your C.V. if you think you need it to get a tenure track position. Just be sure to read the Feibelman reference, which tells you exactly what you need to do to survive a postdoc. In general, academic positions don’t pay as well as industrial positions, but universities offer more freedom, prestige, a richer intellectual environment and the possibility of long-term stability (with tenure). There’s a big difference between startups, regular industrial jobs, and industrial research positions. Startups can be the most lucrative financially, although that’s a big gamble. Read the Kawasaki and Bell references if you want to work at a startup. Expect to put in long hours while losing contact with the research community. Industrial research lies in an uncomfortable middle ground between production jobs and academic research, and blends the advantages and disadvantages of industry vs. academia.

The next two charts are the latest figures I have for academic and industrial salaries.



The above chart is from the March 2002 issue of Computing Research News.  It shows the results of the latest Taulbee survey of academic salaries, where nine-month assistant professor salaries average in the $70-80k range.



The above chart is from the November 2002 issue of Computing Research News, showing compensation for industrial positions (based on 11 organizations and 689 responses). Unsurprisingly, expected compensation from bonuses and stock options dropped significantly from 2000 to 2001.  Industrial compensation is higher than academic, although the Taulbee figures are for nine months of salary (not 12).  With summer salary and other supplements, the difference is reduced.  Still, Computing Research News estimates that total compensation for assistant and associate professors lags that of comprable industrial counterparts by 25%.

No matter where you go after you graduate, maintain your contacts with your alma mater. You may change jobs and move from place to place, but you will always have your degree from your university. If you keep good relations with your university and your fellow former students, that will serve as an excellent base for your personal network.

Conclusion

• Picture a martial artist kneeling before the master sensei in a ceremony to receive a hard-earned black belt. After years of relentless training, the student has finally reached a pinnacle of achievement in the discipline.”Before granting the belt, you must pass one more test,” says the sensei.

  “I am ready,” responds the student, expecting perhaps one final round of sparring.

  “You must answer the essential question: What is the true meaning of the black belt?”

  “The end of my journey,” says the student. “A well-deserved reward for all my hard work.”

  The sensei waits for more. Clearly, he is not satisfied. Finally, the sensei speaks. “You are not yet ready for the black belt. Return in one year.”

  A year later, the student kneels again in front of the sensei.

  “What is the true meaning of the black belt?” asks the sensei.

  “A symbol of distinction and the highest achievement in our art,” says the student.

  The sensei says nothing for many minutes, waiting. Clearly, he is not satisfied. Finally, he speaks. “You are still not ready for the black belt. Return in one year.”

  A year later, the student kneels once again in front of the sensei. And again the sensei asks: “What is the true meaning of the black belt?”

  “The black belt represents the beginning — the start of a never-ending journey of discipline, work, and the pursuit of an ever-higher standard,” says the student.

  “Yes. You are now ready to receive the black belt and begin your work.”

“Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.”
- Fred BrooksThe following story, called “The Parable of the Black Belt,” is excerpted from Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras.

To me, there are two lessons in this story.First, the Ph.D. is the beginning, not the culmination, of your career. Don’t worry about making it your magnum opus. Get out sooner, rather than later.

Second, if you bother to talk to and learn from the people who have already gone through this process, you might graduate two years earlier.

Good luck.

Other Related Guides

• Tomorrow’s Professor, a collection of interesting articles for current graduate students and those seeking academic positions after graduation.
• The superb Graduate Student Resources on the Web! at U. Michigan
• Jeff Hollingsworth’s guides on job hunting
• Information resources for the graduate student. Includes MIT AI Lab guide and other guides from Indiana University and other places.
• Improving the Graduate School Environment for Women in Computer Science
• Graduate School Survival Links
• Advice on Research and Writing
• Rice University Chemistry grad student guide
• Marie des Jardin’s “How to be a Good Graduate Student”
• Stanford Graduate Student Survival Guide
• (Humor) A Day in the Life of a Grad Student
• (Humor) The Ph.D. vs. the Lotto
• The National Association of Graduate-Professional Students
• RPI’s Grad Student Survival Guide in Math Sciences
• Douglas Comer’s essays on computer science and the Ph.D.
• (Humor) Lord of the Rings as an allegory for getting the Ph.D.

Recommended Reading

Bell, C. Gordon and John McNamara. High-Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success. Addison-Wesley, 1991. ISBN 0-201-56321-5.
Dated, but recommended reading if you want to work for a startup.Bronson, Po. The Nudist on the Late Shift. Random House, 1999. ISBN 0375502777.
A fun read, giving the flavor of what working in the Silicon Valley is like.  Many of the chapters previously appeared as articles in Wired.  A snapshot of the culture before the tech bubble burst.

Covey, Stephen R. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Fireside Simon and Schuster, 1989. ISBN 0-671-70863-5.
Excellent overall, with sections on time management, guiding principles and interpersonal skills.

EE Times Salary Survey Issue.
EE Times produces an annual survey and commentary about industrial salaries.

Feibelman, Peter J. A Ph.D. is Not Enough! A Guide to Survival in Science. Addison-Wesley, 1993. ISBN 0-201-62663-2.
Good discussion of research career paths. A must read if you choose to take a postdoc.

Kawasaki, Guy. The Macintosh Way: The Art of Guerrilla Management. Harper Perennial, 1990. ISBN 0-06-097338-2.
Despite problems that occurred at Apple, this book shows the energy and chutzpah required to survive in a startup.

Kelley, Robert E.  How to be a star engineer.  IEEE Spectrum (October 1999), 51-58.
Good description of the skills that are needed to excel at work, which go beyond sheer technical skills.

Kroeger, Otto and Janet M. Thuesen. Type Talk: The 16 Personality Types that Determine How We Live, Love and Work. Tilden Press, 1988. ISBN 0-385-29828-5.
Introduction to the Myers-Briggs type indicators, useful for interpersonal relations.

Maisel, Herbert and Catherine Gaddy. Employment and Salaries of Recent Doctorates in Computer Science. Communications of the ACM 40, 9 (September 1997), 90-93.

Maisel, Herbert and Catherine Gaddy. Employment and Salaries of Recent Doctorates. Communications of the ACM 41, 11 (November 1998), 99-101.
One of the few surveys I have seen for recent C.S. Ph.D.s that includes both industry and academic numbers. The low sample size is a problem, however.

Pascarelli, Emil and Deborah Quilter. Repetitive Strain Injury: A Complete User’s Guide. John Wiley and Sons, 1994. ISBN 0-471-59532-2.
A good introduction to RSI injuries and avoiding them.

Pastore, Robert R.  Stock Options: An Authoritative Guide to Incentive and Nonqualified Stock Options, 2nd edition.  (printed Dec. 1999).  ISBN 0966889924.  PCM Capital Publishing.
I haven't read this but I have been told this is an excellent reference for those of you fortunate enough to have a bundle of stock options.  Give me a few options as a tip for finding this book, ok?   The book covers tax and legal issues and gives advice on when to keep or exercise your options.

Ralston, Anthony. The Demographics of Candidates for Faculty Positions in Computer Science. Communications of the ACM 39, 3 (March 1996), 78-84.
A must read if you are looking for tenure track positions. The author is a former CS professor who led a faculty search, so if you don't believe what I say, then listen to him.

Weinstein, Bob. Résumés Don’t Get Jobs: The Realities and Myths of Job Hunting. McGraw-Hill, 1993. ISBN 0-07-069144-4.
Gritty, realistic job hunting guide for today's market.

White, Pepper. The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT. Plume (Penguin Books), 1992. ISBN 0-452-26841-9.
While this is not about C.S., it does dispel the notion of graduate school as an ivory tower environment.

Yate, Martin. Knock ‘Em Dead: The Ultimate Job Seeker’s Handbook. Bob Adams, Inc.
Good generic guide to job hunting and interviews, including a long section on interview questions.

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Last updated: Fri January 3, 2003

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Copyright 1997-2003, Ronald T. Azuma, except for portions excerpted from elsewhere

by C.G. Lynch

January 12, 2009 —

As the economy falls deeper into recession, many people have turned to LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, to job hunt and connect with contacts who might help them land a new gig. But career experts say your LinkedIn job-hunting efforts will all be for naught if you don’t build your profile page properly and ensure that it is search-friendly for potential employers and recruiters.

You can take some simple steps (all free of charge) to ensure that you’ve done everything possible to differentiate your LinkedIn profile from the others, career management experts say. These steps will make it more likely that recruiters and other LinkedIn users will find you serendipitously when they navigate and search the site.

We’ve arranged these tips (roughly) in the order they appear on a LinkedIn profile page. In order to change your profile, log into LinkedIn and go the left menu. Click on the aptly named “Edit my profile” link.

Picture

While you don’t necessarily need to pay a professional photographer, it’s important to upload a picture to your LinkedIn profile, says Jason Alba, CEO of Jibberjobber.com, a career management firm, and author of the book I’m On LinkedIn – Now What?.

“It doesn’t have to be amazing, but a picture just makes your profile a lot more personable,” Alba says. “With the way digital cameras are nowadays, just put on a suit and have your friend take some pictures and crop it in.”

Professional Headline

Like the New York Times has its slogan “all the news that’s fit to print,” your professional tagline should sum you up for the LinkedIn reader, very concisely.

Because the professional tagline occupies the prime real-estate immediately below where your name is, you really want to make this one count, says Kirsten Dixson, a career management consultant who specializes in helping people utilize web applications for their professional endeavors.
“It’s how you position yourself right away in the reader’s mind,” Dixson says. “It should be a shortened version of your personal brand.”

According to Alba of Jibberjobber.com, if you have a job, it’s not necessary for you to use your actual title, especially since that appears in the “current” jobs section of your LinkedIn profile section. If you’re looking for a job, “think of the tagline as your ten second pitch,” he says. “It’s not easy to do [in so small a space], but make sure you get a clear message in there of what you’re about professionally.”

What Are You Working On?

This is like LinkedIn’s version of Twitter, the short messaging service that allows users to leave status messages regarding what they’re doing. Unlike Twitter, all your status messages should be business-like in tone and compelling for readers.

According to Dixson, these messages could ask an intelligent question to your fellow contacts, known as “connections,” on LinkedIn. Or you might offer mention of a specific project you’re working on that exemplifies the kind of work you do or are interested in pursuing.

Dixson says the status update also provides an easy avenue to keep your page fresh. If you update it regularly, it will show that you’re engaged with your LinkedIn page and the people who visit it.

Your Websites

LinkedIn allows you to list three websites on your profile. Most people choose to add their company sites, or blog (if they have one).

When you go to add a site in the edit settings page, you will be given the option to describe the site generically as “My Company” or “My Blog.” But if you look closely, you can click on “Other,” which will allow you to type in something customary. Alba recommends using that feature.

While you could choose to type in your company name, Alba says you might want to use a phrase that’s descriptive and that will draw readers in. In Alba’s case, for instance, he would describe his blog as “career management blog” instead of the generic “My blog.”

Go get your LinkedIn URL

Like any social network or web service of its kind, LinkedIn will create an address for your profile page. Ideally, you want to have your name at the end of the URL. Such as, for example, http://www.linkedin.com/in/cglynch.

You can edit your LinkedIn URL. And do it quickly, especially if you suspect many users share the same name as you. It’s much like free e-mail services: it’s better to be John Smith@[email service] than JohnSmith1431@[e-mail service].

“This is a URL you might leave in your blog or homepage, or maybe in your professional e-mail signature,” Alba says. “If it’s cleaner and recognizable, that will be helpful.”

Summary

The “summary” section is the meat of your LinkedIn profile, and matters a great deal both in terms of human interaction (do people find it interesting?), and also in terms of LinkedIn’s powerful search engine, which will find certain keywords in it relevant, and return you higher in search results when people query terms in your field of work.

“The more keywords you have the more relevant you are in search,” Alba says. “So if you’re in project management, for example, you might want to have PMP (Project Management Professional) in there.”

But Alba says you must remember that humans will be reading your summary, so don’t get so hung up on keywords that the summary becomes unreadable.

“Some people will do SEO (search engine optimization) and make it just a list of keywords,” Alba says. “That’s not very compelling for a human reading your summary.”

One thing you might do, Dixson says, is focus on writing a good concise summary of yourself in the summary field and save the keywords for “specialties,” which appears as a subsection within the summary and can be modified when you click to edit your summary.

Recommendations

Recommendations allow people viewing your profile to get a third-party perspective on you and your work. If you ask someone to write you a recommendation, you will be able to approve it before it gets posted to your profile.

While Alba says it’s nice to have that recommendation where your boss gushes over all the great work you do, don’t stop there. Go for what career coaches call the 360-degree view.

“If you can have subordinates say you’re the greatest boss in the world, or customers who say you’re great to do business with, that provides [readers of your LinkedIn profile] with a much fuller view of you,” Alba says.

What to do with Apps

In October, LinkedIn launched its applications platform, making it possible for users to add up to 10 different apps to their LinkedIn profile.
“Whatever you do within the apps, keep it on brand,” Alba says.

As an example, then, don’t use the slideshow application to post pictures of your vacation to Florida or anything personal. Instead, the app to create a PowerPoint-like presentation showcasing your work, Dixson says, or display your career goals in another engaging format.

CIO.com

These two scripts are very important for the system admin who regularly works with mail servers and somehow forgets to backup his system username and password! Let’s say somehow we lost the usernames and passwords of the mail server. In this case the admin has to manually create all the users and then change the passwords for all the users. Tedious job. Let’s make our life easier.

First create a file which contains all the user name. Something like this:

nurealam
nayeem
mrahman
farid
rubi
sankar

Save the file as userlist.txt. Now create the following bash file:

#!/bin/sh
for i in `more userlist.txt `
do
echo $i
adduser $i
done

Save the file and exit.

chmod 755 userlist.txt

Now run the file:

./userlist.txt

This will add all the users to the system. Now we have to change the passwords. Let’s say we want username123 as password. So for user nayeem the password will benayeem123, rubi123 for user rubi and so on.

Create another bash file as follows:

#!/bin/sh
for i in `more userlist.txt `
do
echo $i
echo $i"123" | passwd –-stdin "$i"
echo; echo "User $username’s password changed!"
done

Run the file. All the passwords are changed.

If you want to force all your users to change password, use the following code:

Force all your users to change their passwords because the temporary password is a security risk

#!/bin/sh
for i in `more userlist.txt `
do
echo $i
echo $i | change -d 0 "$i"
echo; echo "User $i will be forced to change password on next login!"
done

I then log as that user and see this

WARNING: Your password has expired.
You must change your password now and login again!
Changing password for user amcorona.
Changing password for amcorona
(current) UNIX password:

<djahandarie> we ain’t here to do e-c-e
<djahandarie> we’re here to do c-s-e on the w-e-b
<djahandarie> listen to me spit these rhymes
<djahandarie> while i program lines
<djahandarie> and commit web accessibility crimes
<djahandarie> word, son
<http402> You talk like your big on these I-Net kicks,
<http402> But your shit flows slower than a two-eighty-six.
<http402> I’m tracking down hosts and nmap scans,
<http402> While Code Igniter’s got you wringing your hands.
<http402> Cut the crap rap,
<http402> Or I’ll run ettercap,
<http402> Grab your AIM chat,
<http402> N’ send a PC bitch-slap!
<http402> peace
<djahandarie> you’re talkin bout down hosts and nmap scans
<djahandarie> while i got other plans
<djahandarie> you’re at your new job, but you can’t even do it right
<djahandarie> you just create a plight with your http rewrites
<djahandarie> i’ve been on the web since the age of three
<djahandarie> you just got on directly off the bus from mississippi
<djahandarie> respect yo’ elders, bitch
<http402> You’ve been webbin’ since three, but still ain’t grown up,
<http402> Gotta update your config and send the brain a SIGHUP.
<http402> You say you’re that old? No wonder you’re slow!
<http402> You’re knocking at the door while I run this show!
<http402> Elders my ass, you’re shit’s still in school,
<http402> Hunt and pecking at the keyboard like a spaghetti-damned fool,
<http402> Rim-riffing your hard drive like a tool,
<http402> Face it. I rule.
<djahandarie> i erase my harddrives with magnets (bitch)
<djahandarie> all you can do is troll on the fagnets
<djahandarie> and son, my brain’s wrapped in a nohup
<djahandarie> it wont be hurt by the words you throwup
<djahandarie> dont mind me while i emerge my ownage
<djahandarie> while you’re still over there apt-getting your porridge
<djahandarie> you say i’m still in school
<djahandarie> but the fact is that i know the rule
<djahandarie> cuz you need to go back to grade three
<djahandarie> and you better plea, that they take sucky graduates from c-s-e
<http402> Time to bend over and apply a patch,
<http402> Your brain’s throwing static like a CD with a scratch.
<http402> Your connection got nuked and you’ve met your match.
<http402> You run a single process like a VAX with a batch.
<http402> I’d pass the torch to a real winner
<http402> But it’d just scorch a while-loop spinner
<http402> Caught in a loop that you cant escape,
<http402> I run clock cycles around your words and flows,
<http402> Cuz your rhyme is like a PS fan: it’ blows,
<http402> Your water-cooled lyrics leak and it shows,
<http402> Take your ass back to alt.paid.for.windows.
<djahandarie> Good god, I can’t even respond to that.
<djahandarie> You win haha
* http402 takes a bow

1. If you owe someone money, always pay them back in a bar. Preferably during Happy Hour.
2. Always toast before doing a shot.
3. Whoever buys the shot gets the first chance to offer a toast.
4. Change your toast at least once a month.
5. Buying someone a drink is five times better than a handshake.
6. Buying a strange woman a drink is still cool. Buying all her drinks is dumb.
7. Never borrow more than one cigarette from the same person in one night.
8. When the bartender is slammed, resist the powerful urge to order a slightly-dirty, very-dry, in-and-out, super-chilled half-and-half martini with a lemon twist. Limit orders to beer, straight shots and two-part cocktails.
9. Get the bartender’s attention with eye contact and a smile.
10. Do not make eye contact with the bartender if you do not want a drink.
11. Unacceptable things to say after doing a shot:
Great, now I’m going to get drunk.
I hate shots.
It’s coming back up.
12. Never, ever tell a bartender he made your drink too strong.
13. If he makes it too weak, order a double next time. He’ll get the message.
14. If you offer to buy a woman a drink and she refuses, she does not like you.
15. If you offer to buy a woman a drink and she accepts, she still might not like you.
16. If she buys you a drink, she likes you.
17. If someone offers to buy you a drink, do not upgrade your liquor preference.
18. Always have a corkscrew in your house.
19. If you don’t have a corkscrew, push the cork down into the bottle with a pen.
20. Drink one girly drink in public, and you will forever be known as the guy who drinks girly drinks.
21. Our parents were better drinkers than we are.
22. Never talk to someone in the restroom unless you’re doing the same thing – urinating, waiting in line or washing your hands.
23. Girls hang out, apply make-up, and have long talks in the bathroom. Men do not.
24. After your sixth drink, do not look at yourself in the mirror. It will shake your confidence.
25. It is only permissible to shout ‘woo-hoo!’ if you are doing a shot with four or more people.
26. If there is a DJ, you can request a song only once per night. If he doesn’t play it within half an hour, don’t approach him again. If he does play it, don’t approach him again.
27. Learn how to make a rose out of a bar napkin. You’ll be surprised how well it works.
28. If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to drink in a bar. Go to the liquor store.
29. If you owe someone twenty dollars or less, you may pay them back in beer.
30. Never complain about the quality or brand of a free drink.
31. If you have been roommates with someone more than six months, you may drink all their beer, even if it’s hidden, as long as you leave them one.
32. You can have a shot of their hard liquor only if the cap has been cracked and the bottle goes for less than $25.
33. The only thing that tastes better than free liquor is stolen liquor.
34. If you bring Old Milwaukee to a party, you must drink at least 2 cans before you start drinking the imported beer in the fridge.
35. Learn to appreciate hangovers. If it was all good times every jackass would be doing it.
36. If you ever feel depressed, get out a bartender’s guide and browse thru all the drinks you’ve never tried.
37. Try one new drink each week.
38. If you’re the bar’s sole customer, you are obliged to make small talk with the bartender until he stops acknowledging you. Then you’re off the hook. The same goes for him.
39. Never tip with coins that have touched you. If your change is $1.50, you can tell the barmaid to keep the change, but, once she has handed it to you, you cannot give it back. To a bartender or cocktail waitress, small change has no value.
40. If you have ever told a bartender, “Hey, it all spends the same,” then you are a cheap ass.
41. Anyone on stage or behind a bar is fifty percent better looking.
42. You can tell how hard a drinker someone is by how close they keep their drink to their mouth.
43. A bar is a college, not a nursery. If you spill a beer, clean it up. If you break a glass, wait for a staff member to clean it up, then blame it on someone else.
44. Being drunk is feeling sophisticated without being able to say it.
45. It’s okay to drink alone.
46. After three drinks, you will forget a woman’s name two seconds after she tells you. The rest of the night you will call her “baby” or “darling”.
47. Nothing screams ‘Gay’ louder than swirling an oversized brandy snifter.
48. Men don’t drink from straws. Unless you’re doing a Mind or Face Eraser.
49. If you do a shot, finish it. If you don’t plan to finish it, don’t accept it.
50. Never brood in a dance bar. Never dance in a dive bar.
51. Never play more than three songs by the same artist in a row.
52. Your songs will come on as you’re leaving the bar.
53. Never yell out jukebox selections to someone you don’t know.
54. Never lie in a bar. You may, however, grossly exaggerate and lean.
55. If you think you might be slurring a little, then you are slurring a lot. If you think you are slurring a lot, then you are not speaking English.
56. Screaming, “Someone buy me a drink!” has never worked.
57. For every drink, there is a five percent better chance you will get in a fight. There is also a three percent better chance you will lose the fight.
58. Fighting an extremely drunk person when you are sober is hilarious.
59. If you’re broke and a friend is “sporting you”, you must laugh at all his jokes and play wingman when he makes his move.
60. If you’re broke and a friend is “ragging on you”, you may steal any drink he leaves unattended.
61. Never rest your head on a table or bar top. It is the equivalent of voluntarily putting your head on a chopping block.
62. If you are trading rounds with a friend and he asks if you’re ready for another, always say “Yes”. Once you fall out of sync you will end up buying more drinks than him.
63. If you’re going to hit on a member of the bar staff, make sure you tip well before and after, regardless of her response.
64. The people with the most money are rarely the best tippers.
65. Before you die, single-handedly make one decent martini.
66. Asking a bartender what beers are on tap when the handles are right in front of you is the equivalent of saying, “I’m an idiot.”
67. Never ask a bartender “What’s good tonight?” They do not fly in the scotch fresh from the coast every morning.
68. If there is a line for drinks, get your damn drink and step the hell away from the bar.
69. If there is ever any confusion, the fuller beer is yours.
70. The patrons at your local bar are your extended family, your father, hers, your brothers and sisters. Except you get to sleep with these sisters. And if you’re really drunk, the mothers.
71. It’s acceptable, traditional, in fact, to disappear during a night of hard drinking. You will appear mysterious, and your friends will understand. If they even notice.
72. Never argue your tab at the end of the night. Remember, you’re hammered, and they’re sober. It’s akin to a precocious five-year-old arguing the super-string theory with a physicist. 99.9% of the time you’re wrong and, either way, you’re going to come off as a jackass.
73. If you bring booze to a party, you must drink it or leave it.
74. If you hesitate more than three seconds after the bartender looks at you, you do not deserve a drink.
75. Beer makes you mellow, champagne makes you silly, wine makes you dramatic, tequila makes you felonious.
76. The greatest thing a drunkard can do is buy a round of drinks for a packed bar.
77. Never preface a conversation with a bartender with “I know this is going to be a hassle, but . . .”
78. When you’re in a bar and drunk, your boss is just another guy begging for a fat lip. Unless he’s buying.
79. If you are 86′d, do not return for at least three months. To come back sooner makes it appear no other bar wants you.
80. Anyone with three or more drinks in his hands has the right of way.
81. If you’re going to drink on the job, drink vodka. It’s the no-tell liquor.
82. There’s nothing wrong with drinking before noon. Especially if you’re supposed to be at work.
83. The bar clock moves twice as fast from midnight to last call.
84. A flask engraved with a personal message is one of the best gifts you can ever give. And make sure there’s something in it.
85. On the intimacy scale, sharing a quiet drink is between a handshake and a kiss.
86. You will forget everyone of of these rules by your fifth drink.

Tech and and auto industries lead the number of planned layoffs according to a monthly survey.

By Kenneth Musante, CNNMoney.com staff writer

October 1, 2008: 7:36 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of job cuts announced in September rose as the economy slowed, according to a report released Wednesday.

Positions on the cutting board rose 7.2% to 95,094 from 88,736 the previous month, and were 33% higher than the same month last year, when 71,739 cuts were announced, according to outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

September brought the announced layoff total for the third quarter to 287,142 – the largest number since 2005, according to the report.

The computer industry was the hardest hit, with 25,715 positions on the line after PC maker Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) announced the largest workforce reduction of the year, the report said.

HP said it would cut 24,600 jobs worldwide as a result of its acquisition of Electronic Data Systems Corp. But since those cuts were a result of the deal and not a consequence of the ailing economy, the report noted, HP’s workforce could gain many of those jobs back.

The struggling auto industry came in second place, with plans to drop 14,595 jobs, while the apparel industry came in third place, announcing 8,350 cuts, according to the report.

Surprisingly, planned job cuts were relatively modest in the financial sector, the report said, despite the turmoil that plagued the nation’s financial institutions during the month.

Banks wait for bailout

The data showed that finance industry had announced 8,244 job cuts in September, compared with a spike of 27,169 during the same month last year as the credit crunch began to unfold. But they did jump from 2,182 in August.

September saw a major reshaping of the financial landscape as institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch (MER, Fortune 500), AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), Wachovia (WB, Fortune 500) and Washington Mutual were acquired, bailed out, or went bankrupt.

“While all of these scenarios are being played out, the fate of the workers remains in limbo,” John A. Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a statement.

Financial institutions are waiting to see if Congress passes the Bush administration’s $700 billion rescue plan that would allow the government to buy up tainted assets in order to keep their businesses from failing.

Whether the bailout plan is approved by Congress – and what form it takes – will affect the number of layoffs that may eventually be announced, according to Challenger.

“One of the big questions is: Are there going to be more runs on banks and financial institutions?’” he told CNNMoney.com.

If there is no bailout plan, financial job cuts will likely increase, according to Challenger. On the other hand, if all banks take advantage of the government’s offer, the number of layoffs could be limited, since no one institution is singled out.

But if a bailout plan passes and is only embraced by a few institutions, that would emphasize the weakness of those companies, and we might see more job cuts, he added. 

So on 9/13/2008 I ordered an HP Tablet tx2500z because my old Fujitsu tablet’s keyboard began to malfunction, so I took that opportunity to upgrade the system (after much thought, of course).  There was a GREAT coupon code found on SlickDeals for an additional $150 off the already reduced price (price went from $1099 to 899), so I decided to pull the trigger on that deal.

After placing the order online, the site indicated it would take 10 days to build the machine.  10 days?  And then an additional 5 – 7 days for shipping.  Wha?  Why so long?  Well, I got a good deal, so I suppose I can wait.  Mind you, I’ve been anxiously waiting for this system, as I have a lot of work to do… and… I spent a lot of money.  So I want it!

It is now the 11th day of being “In Production”.  I called this morning to the Customer Service line and spoke to a nice Indian woman (I could tell from the accent  – and because I asked her).  She was kind, however, I was less than patient at this point.  She verified my information and then told me what I already knew

Customer Service: “The order is still in production sir.”

Me: “Yea, I knew that, that’s why I called. ”

She checked the system and there were no reported delays.

Customer Service: “Can you call back tomorrow and check?”, she said to me.

Me: “No, if I call back tomorrow, it will be to cancel my order and purchase the Dell tablet I should have ordered initially.”

Customer Service: “Ohh, sorry sir.”

Me: “I don’t want special treatment, I just want my item when it was promised to me”

Customer Service:  “I understand.  Please call back tomorrow.”

So, back to the title of this post.  If I owned HP stock, I would sell it like it were infected with ebola.  Why?  Because if it takes HP 10 days to build a laptop, and they can’t even produce a laptop in 10 days, then there’s an internal problem within this company.  Dell can produce laptops within 5 days of ordering, and have them out the door ON the 5th day.  Why in the world can’t HP do that?

Finally, while the customer service person was nice and sweet, she was not helpful.  Helpful, to me, means bringing to light something that I would not have noticed on my own, and thus, making the situation a bit more bearable, understandable, or at the very least give me some confidence that I won’t have to cancel my order and go with a competitor.  She was none of these.

This may have been a random occurrence, but I find it hard to believe. I think the cheap and low quality of the Compaq has crept its way up the chain of command, to the point where the company can’t even stay true to a very gracious and heavily padded deadline (10 days is just crazy!).

EDIT: 10.7.08

Another reason why I would sell, if I owned the stock, of course (and may explain why my experience was sub-par as a consumer): LiNK

** Thanks Rob **

 

By Audrey Irvine
CNN

(CNN) — One of my girlfriends recently got engaged. Before we could even bask in her happiness, the conversation turned to the dreaded guest list.

Audrey Irvine was not only invited to her cousin’s wedding in 2004, she served as a bridesmaid.

Fun questions like, “So, honey, do we have to invite your great aunt, whom you haven’t seen since you were 10?”

So, who should get an invite?

Too often, women are pressured into inviting way too many people to their weddings out of a sense of obligation. Parents, prospective in-laws and grooms can turn a simple wedding into a grand affair.

And as soon as that engagement ring catches her eye, that occasional lunch acquaintance feels entitled to share in your happy nuptials.

Then you realize too late that the majority of people at your wedding don’t really know you or what has been going on in your life up until your big day. iReport.com: Share stories of your not-so-perfect wedding

This quiz is something I shared with friends years ago and feel inclined to share with other women.

Here are 10 questions couples can use to trim that guest list and weed out the people you really don’t want at your wedding.

1) Name the city I’m living in now (Good one to weed folks out, especially if you have moved a lot. Don’t use this if you’ve lived in the same place for 10 years).

2) Name at least two of my closest friends.

3) Name my current employer and my past employer (Again, if you’ve remained in the same job for 15 years, this does not apply).

4) Do I have any kids?

5) Do you know the name of my fiancé? Bonus question: Where and when did we meet?

6) Do you know where my parents are and whether they are still alive? (Imagine a friend at your wedding asking how long have your parents been married when they divorced years ago).

7) Name at least two of my hobbies.

8) How old am I? (My favorite is when family friends would query, ‘Are you 28 now?” Imagine their surprise when I proclaimed, ‘yeah, 10 years ago!’)

9) Where did I go to college? (Some people might not remember whether you attended college or even graduated.)

10) Name my last boyfriend before this engagement. Bonus question: if you can name the last two and why we broke up. If you get the bonus question right, that might automatically get you in.

Scoring helps determine whether you get invited.

If you score 50 percent or below, you definitely are not getting invited.

If you score barely over 50 percent, you are on the waiting list. If someone who scored better than you cannot attend, you might get an invitation. This barely acceptable person who might be invited may get you a great gift because of their guilt for scoring so low.

If you score over 60 percent, you get an invitation.

Now, you don’t have to be as extreme as I would love to be and send these questions with the save the date card. However, imagine if, over the course of your engagement, you pitch these questions to a few prospective guests just to see how they do.

In the end, what matters most is a beautiful wedding day and a sustained marriage.

Wouldn’t you like to celebrate it with loved ones who are invested in your past and present in addition to your future? Plus, it will help you avoid the embarrassing introduction of your new husband to someone who didn’t even realize until that moment that you didn’t marry your college sweetheart, whom you haven’t seen in 15 years!