Schedule

Pre-class Work:

• Create a slide to introduce yourself, answer survey
• Read and answer questions about:
  • The Fear of Publicly Not Knowing
  • What you should know about us (the course staff)

In Class: [slides]

• Meet the G1 cohort
• Discuss shared worries + implied assumptions about expectations
• What is research? What skills are necessary to do research? What is this seminar about?
• A brief guide to Harvard, and chat with G2s

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
• Summarize the paper, reflect on your strategy for reading the paper

In Class: [slides]

• Why think about self-regulated learning
• How to read a research paper
• Practice skimming papers: (don’t read before class!)
  • Rx: Treating Bugs As Allergies – A Safe Method to Survive Software Failures
  • The Dimpled Manifold Model of Adversarial Examples in Machine Learning

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Skim the fellowship advice from Harvard and by MIT (click on left-pane links).
• Peruse the list of fellowships compiled by John Girash and by NC State

In Class:

• Discussion of effective scientific writing
• Panel with the SEAS Graduate Writing Advisor Suzanne Smith, and with Ph.D. students (TBD)

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Skim How New Ideas Diffuse in Science and Citing for High Impact and answer reflection questions.
• Reflect on your own literature search strategy
• Bring a problem statement for a current/previous research project

In Class: [slides]

• How to do a literature search

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Review How to read a research paper
• Spend one hour reading and trying to get as much as you can out of Randomized Approximation Schemes for Cuts and Flows in Capacitated Graphs. Note that the paper is too long to read entirely in one hour; use strategies like those from the paper-reading guide to figure out where to focus your attention and try to get as much value as you can in the hour. In particular, start with the introduction and try to understand what are the main contributions of the paper (both the high-level takeaways and the precise theorem statements), and then selectively delve into the technical sections as needed to improve your understanding and/or according to your interest.

In Class: [slides]

• Reflect on your own strategy reading more theoretical papers
• Practice new strategies on A Multiplicative Weights Mechanism for Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis.

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read What triggers imposter phenomenon among academic faculty? A critical incident study exploring antecedents, coping, and development opportunities.
• Answer reflection questions, and think of questions to ask the faculty.

In Class:

• Faculty panel about their expectations of students and experiences as students, as well as about their experiences as faculty

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read:
  • How to make the most out of your Ph.D, Section 2: What does your advisor expect from you in your first year?
• Answer reflection questions, and think of questions to ask the panel

In Class: [slides]

• Panel on managing advising relationships with: Paula Rodriguez Diaz, Roy Rinberg, Sanket Shah, and Shirley Zhang.
• Special note: no faculty present

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• In this class we will discuss and practice how to update your advisor(s)/collaborator(s) on recent progress. Please come to class with a topic in mind – a project (e.g. current or past research project, a hobbie, etc.) that you have worked on but haven’t yet completed. The topic should be reasonably technical (your fellow classmates should only have a partial prior understanding of the topic).
• Reflect on your own strategies for updating collaborators on progress.

In Class:

• How to communicate about weekly progress with your collaborators

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Follow this template in preparing a written “research report”, following the structure discussed here.

In Class:

• Workshop research reports with peers.

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Reflect and identify a least one way that your current self-organization system is successful and one way that it can be further developed.
• Think through and list out your commitments for this semester (or next)

In Class:

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• How to make the most out of your Ph.D: A guide from current to incoming students

In Class:

• Panel on debugging unhealthy self-expectations with: Usha Bhalla, Jake Ruotolo, Simon Warchol
• Special note: no faculty present

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Watch The Pursuit of Collective Intelligence, by Professor Radhika Nagpal
• Reflect on the past semester

In Class:

• How our societal misconceptions about science hinder us from creating an inclusive community that performs useful science
• How can we break positive feedback cycles that reinforce these misconceptions?