timuralp

Is your advisor on the paper/going to the other conference? Maybe he/she can present it? I know that has happened before when students were not able to come to the conference.

One way to deal with it is to prepare for the conversations with the professors: skim their latest research papers/books/articles and get a sense of what they're working on, look at their students. Then make a list of questions about their research, the school, the department, their interaction with students. That'll carry you through those conversations. As far as social anxiety goes, though, I'm not sure what would be helpful advice. My approach is to slow down and take longer pauses, thinking of the responses and taking deep breaths. It gets better after a while. Good luck!

In computer science (in most subfields that I'm aware of), important work is published in conferences. Journals tend to be more for expanded versions of prior conference papers (and novel works are seldom submitted there). Most (probably all) conferences publish the proceedings and that counts as a publication you can put on the CV/resume/web page/whatever. This is one stark difference between computer science and most other fields.

That's part of the answer there. The other part is that being an academic involves a lot of long-term thinking and managing of students, but not as much actual research work (in a lot of cases). Industry labs are a little different, but some are also pretty similar. If research is not what you ultimately want to be doing, then what is the point of getting a degree that you won't actually use? You've kinda conflated two problems here. Compute science, as a field, tends to attract more introverted people. I bet the majority of them were introverted before entering grad school and CS programs don't push on them to get out of that comfort zone. You don't have to be that guy and it's not fair to claim that the degree itself is the reason for the personalities (I'm sure it's true in some cases though). There are much more social academics/grad students and maybe you just haven't run into them. In the end, it's your life and it's unfortunate that it seems people are trying to live some of their lives vicariously through you. Realize that you only have to answer to one person and that's you. Your family will still love you even if you *only* have an MS. Advanced degrees are not exactly a dime a dozen and it's about figuring out what you want to do with your life. One possibility you haven't mentioned (and one that I would strongly encourage) is to look into internships and to talk with your advisor. If you go off and work for a summer and realize that you love that environment -- great, problem solved. It's ok to leave with an MS even after 3rd, 4th, 5th year. You don't have to make the decision right this second. At the same time, you can also apply for jobs and just gauge what kinda offers you're getting. Applying doesn't mean committing to being hired.

Pick publications that are conducive to discussion (which implies you know something about the students' interests). An approach to ensure attendance is to provide food, however, at that point watch out for people showing up just for food and not contributing to the conversation. Anyway, it's hard but could be rewarding. Good luck!

I usually figure out the main areas of work in the particular subfield. Looking at the survey papers helps with that. Then I figure out the papers that originated that trend of research (in CS, a lot of topics are very new) and find the relevant papers that cited them. That gets me to the point where I can describe the basic idea and the subsequent improvements on it -- state of the art at the time of writing. Since there may be multiple different approaches to solving a single problem, I end up categorizing the papers by the approach taken. I don't read each paper, but enough to understand the major contributions of each one, so that I can describe in 1-2 sentences.

My first year I found a running buddy on craigslist and it worked out quite well. For one, I always felt guilty if I were either late or had to cancel a run and we ran about 3 times a week. It's tricky to find people that can match up nicely in pace, distance, etc, but it's worth a shot. If craigslist's too sketchy for you, try emailing some sort of a social list in your department or if there isn't one, it may be good to set one up.

I bought a $7 pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring

Similarly, some credit card companies (AmEx and Visa are two I know about for sure) include some insurance. Visa includes the Collision Damage Waiver and liability insurance is included in every rental.

I just looked it up: ssh can act as a SOCKS proxy. This is nice because you can forward all browser traffic through it and it will appear as if you're logged on from school. Here's how you can set it up on windows: http://www.techrepub...-on-windows/421 *nix/OS X is here: http://lifehacker.co...ssh-socks-proxy Firefox, Chrome, and IE, I believe, all support using a SOCKS proxy and you can point them to localhost. Other browsers probably do too. Edit: for more info on what it is/how it works/other options, man ssh on Linux gives a good (maybe too thorough) overview.

It's a trade-off between putting more load on the processor or more load on the network. You're probably right that since we have quite a few compute cycles that are not utilized and the network is commonly the bottleneck, it'd make sense to keep it enabled. Either way, it's not too hard to add -C wget can do quite a few powerful things (like submitting post requests, etc). Check out the man page for it if it seems necessary.

A few things: - try ssh -C for compression and see if the lag is better - you can download stuff with wget if you know the URL (it can follow redirects) You could also tunnel to an HTTP proxy if there is one setup at school. Edit: Looks like the last suggestion is moot.

Here's a sample of advice for prospective students looking to contact professors: 1. "I will not review any applications to Computer Science until you have been accepted into the program. At that point, we can explore common research interests". 2. "I only hire students who have been admitted to XXX. If you are interested in an RAship, you will first need to apply via XXX web site." Some professors will encourage students to actually contact them, but you should look at their pages, see what (if any) advice is there and proceed accordingly. The advice I have gotten from a number of faculty members is not to contact anyone until after the admission decision has been made. My contention is that students who are applying to graduate school rarely know the specific area they are interested in (they might know it broadly, like Systems or AI) and often switch advisors after being accepted. In that light, consider schools that fit a number of interests with a number of faculty working your general area of interest. Some typical responses: 1. "We’re always looking for good students and I encourage you to apply (although I should be clear that the admissions committee does their thing independent of me)" 2. "In general, we are always looking for great students in general (not necessarily specific to any projects), so I encourage you to consider applying to XXX" Of course, some professors would also be eager to discuss their research with you, but don't expect that to be the norm.

Also, AT&T u-verse is fiber to the neighborhood in most of Ann Arbor (I think), which is not as nice as fiber to premises, but the speeds are pretty nice and it is reliable. However, it is more expensive -- at least for the packages I've looked at. I have the Comcast economy packages (which they somehow don't offer anymore) and get their slowest Internet connection + expanded basic for $50/month. The 1.5 Mbps link is not great, but it works for the small stuff (including watching movies off Amazon prime) and I'm in the office often enough to make it tolerable.

Yeah, well, you know, that's, just, like, your opinion, man