I was excited to hear that "my student"* Justin Thaler, working with Salil Vadhan and his student Jon Ullman, had a paper accepted to ICALP (Faster Algorithms for Privately Releasing Marginals). It's a great example of something that's been going very nicely here at Harvard: students (+advisors) crossing boundaries and collaborating together on problems.
I know it's a common refrain that people don't realize that computer science research is, generally speaking, a highly collaborative enterprise, but it's certainly worth repeating. Most projects aren't done by one person coding or mathematically proving alone, but working as part of a team. Graduate students should know that and embrace it. There are huge advantages of this approach. The natural one to point out is the great synergies in developing and working through ideas from multiple people with different skill sets and points of view. You also learn about new things that can turn out to be useful to you in unpredictable ways by working on projects outside your standard box. But perhaps less often mentioned is that working with others is generally just much more fun, and I think it's easier to produce good and great research when you're having fun doing it.
I feel like that's stating the obvious, but thinking back to my time in graduate school, maybe it's not. Collaboration in the theory group certainly wasn't frowned upon, but it wasn't entirely actively promoted, either. Micah Adler and John Byers worked very successfully together on several papers early in their graduate student careers, and I remember working on some problems with multiple friendly older students. But I also recall, while not what I would call a competitive atmosphere, the sense that you really had to prove yourself "on your own", especially in putting together a thesis, leading to at least some cases where "credit" became a issue to some people. The theory group was pretty social, so overall the joys of working together probably won out overall. To me today feels like a non-trivial delta from that (here at Harvard at least, but more widely as well), though perhaps to the students aiming to graduate and get jobs it doesn't feel that way -- I can imagine, depending on the setting, that the pressure to do something great on your own is still primary.
Maybe the most encouraging thing I can try to say, which really clicked solidly in my head this recruiting season, is that one thing I look for in a candidate is whether they can work well with other people -- not just their advisor. I think that's important, both for the candidate's future success and for CS at Harvard. I don't think there's a formula I have in mind to weight "individual success" vs. "group success", but I'd be more skeptical of a candidate that didn't have signs of both. Further, I recognize that the talent of the individual can shine through on group projects -- while the ability of a candidate to work within groups can't really shine through on individual projects.
*Increasingly a misnomer, as Justin's well beyond being "my student" in any meaningful sense at this point, but it's still the most convenient reference.
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7 comments:
> Increasingly a misnomer, as Justin's well beyond being "my student" in any meaningful sense at this point, but it's still the most convenient reference.
Once an advisor, always an advisor :)
Collaborating too much, especially with people with higher reputations, will destroy your job prospects. On the other hand, some collaboration is good for getting reference letters.
Anon #2: I don't think necessarily that collaborating "too much" will destroy your job prospects, if you clearly have leadership roles in some of your projects. But you're right in thinking that if all/most your work is with people with higher reputations, others can base their opinion of you on that. All the more reason to encourage student collaborations...
Collaborating too much, especially with people with higher reputations, will destroy your job prospects.
This is way off. If your contribution is significant then working with well-known people is a big positive. Credit is not divided and doesn't reduce much as the author list increases. People notice who gives the talks, which is often a junior author.
A big factor to look for in hiring is collaborative work with people other than your advisor. Internships often involve collaborative projects and can be a great way to get that experience. Alternatively, groups of grad students can do this on their own.
Anecdotally, it is common that postdocs suddenly become more productive than when they were PhD students. A big part of this is the chance they get to collaborate outside of the narrow advising relationship.
All this said, I do know that in evaluating junior faculty for tenure, certain institutions (not mine) will disregard any work that is done jointly with senior people at the same institution. I can understand it to some extent ("why should we keep this expertise when we already have someone tenured who has it?") but I think it tends create an atmosphere that inhibits collaboration among graduate students which is a bad thing.("If my students collaborate with a senior faculty members' students then that senior faculty might get drawn in which will devalue my contribution.")
Credit is not divided and doesn't reduce much as the author list increases.
Actually, in many places credit is divided. Certainly, having, for instance, five very strong papers, all with two or more co-authors is quite different than having five very strong papers by yourself.
What happens if your colleagues don't have the same research profile (in terms of quality)? Do you still collaborate? I guess this situation will not happen at Harvard, but most other universities may only have a small percentage of their staff who are 'outstanding'.
How I wish my PhD advisor had understood this. Unfortunately I think he was more interested on getting his name on as many papers as possible. So, when the opportunity came to turn an interesting class project (with another prof and student from a different department) into a paper, he nixed the idea. This is one of the reasons why I didn't complete my PhD...
(after quitting, I was quite happy to get a different class project accepted as a conference paper!)
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