• Have everyone log into Discord
• Have everyone log into Zoom to say "hi"
• Community troubleshooting

• Graduate school can be a safety net during economic contraction
• Address why stay in academia when there is important work in, e.g., activism that students may be compelled to do right now

• Discussion of Pay
• Discussion of TA (teaching assistantships) vs RA (research assistantships) vs fellowships
• Explanation of the PI (principal investigator, a.k.a. your boss!)’s perspective and how understanding this is helpful

• Discussion of what the PhD actually is
• Must work in an area where you can receive guidance/mentorship
• How it is more like an apprenticeship
• Developing mastery of a topic, building skills along the way

• Programming/Coding
• Reading papers (and doing so quickly!)
• Math/formalization
• Writing
• Experiment design + human subjects (pivot)

• Identifying interesting research questions
• Forming hypotheses
• Designing formalisms and/or experiments to evaluate those questions
• Evaluating your own work
• Navigating related work
• Critiquing others’ work

• Current students talk about about their experiences regarding graduate school.
• Graduated CS students who perhaps did REUs or had some research experience and decided NOT to go to graduate school
• Graduated PhDs who are not in academic positions, to talk about non-faculty paths that the PhD opens up

• How to follow up
• Keep in touch
• We will send reminder emails that you can opt-out of

Emma Tosch · Programming Languages (PL), Experimental Design, general intersection of PL/Systems and Data Science/Machine Learning

Brittany I. Johnson · Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Machine Learning

Tyler Derr · Social Network Analysis, Data Mining, Machine Learning

Joe Near · Privacy, Security, Programming Languages

Jeremiah Onaolapo · Cybersecurity, Social Network Security, Understanding malicious activity in online accounts

Jesse Thomason · Natural Language Processing for Robotics (RoboNLP), Grounded Language Learning

Katharina Kann · Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning

Frank Ferraro · Natural Language Processing, Semantics, Semi-supervised & Unsupervised Machine Learning (ML), Grounded language (vision & language)

Xi He · Privacy, databases

Owen Arden · Language-based security, PL, security, distributed systems

Stefan Muller · Broadly: programming languages (PL). Specifically: Applications of PL techniques, type systems, parallelism, resource analysis.

Kevin Moran · Software Engineering (SE), Machine Learning (ML), mobile systems

Gregory J. Stein · Intersection of robotics/machine Learning, planning, representation learning, trustworthy agents (e.g., robots)

David Jurgens · Natural Language Processing, Computational Social Science, Science of Science

Antonis Anastasopoulos · Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, Endangered Languages, Multilinguality

Krystal Maughan is a second year PhD student at the University of Vermont, where she is researching provable fairness, privacy and machine learning. She previously obtained an undergraduate degree in Film, Photography and Visual Arts, an a double minor in Theatre Arts and Art History. Before attending grad school, she worked in R&D for the film industry for several years and completed several software internships in the Bay area, as well a workshop at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory before starting graduate school at UVM.

Annabel Rothschild is a first-year PhD student at Georgia Tech. After dabbling in many dark arts—including programming language syntax design, user-focused security and privacy, and (dis/mis)information—she settled happily into an interdisciplinary graduate program within a traditional CS department and a subsequent lifetime of trying to explain what exactly "Human-Centered Computing" means. Her current research adventures revolve around developing technical tools to assist in data literacy skill building.

Mayeline Peña is a Senior Computer Science and Dance major at Smith College who has done research as an undergraduate and is ambivalent about graduate school. In her own words, "Come and share with someone that understands what your biggest fears and hidden questions about what PhD programs are and where to go next. If you don't know what your questions are, perfect! Maybe my worries and queries can help you learn your own."

Amee Trivedi is a final year Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, graduating in Spring 2021. She works in the areas of ubiquitous computing and passive sensing. She is interested in graph based systems, AI in healthcare, ubiquitous computing, mhealth, and data science. She worked in the industry as a kernel programmer for several years before starting graduate school. She loves doing research and aims to work on problems that have a high societal impact.

Alicia Boyd is a 4th-year Ph.D. Candidate at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Her research looks at (1) how the virality of #MeToo harmed the established 'me too' movement by occluding Black women's voices, (2) how various Twitter users highlighted their intersectional position during the viral #MeToo movement by utilizing machine learning techniques that focus on intersectional analysis, and (3) visualizing intersectional analysis by modifying traditional social network analysis. Alicia is a GAANN fellow, GEM fellow, and 2019 recipient of the Grace Hopper Scholar Award. Outside and inside the university, she mentors women and girls of color navigating academia, encouraging health and wellness, and promoting wholeness in their voices. Her educational journey is atypical, which allows her to view and approach situations and tasks by placing people first, inspired by her formal training in the medical field. Alicia has earned both her Masters in Mathematics and Higher Education from University Missouri-Saint Louis.

Molly McMahon is a 2017 graduate of UMass Amherst, where she did her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science. She has since been working in Boston as a software engineer at Viasat, most recently on various NLP applications for the automated customer care team. While at UMass, she participated in various REUs and independent studies in natural language processing, programming languages and systems, and causal analysis, as well as internships in various industries.

Kevin Lubick is a Senior Software Engineer at Google. He works on the Chrome team, specifically on the Skia graphics library. While in graduate school, Kevin researched tools to help people build software effectively. That passion for building software that developers find useful followed him into the world of industry - the projects he oversees as tech lead help developers go fast and avoid breaking things. In his spare time, he teaches as an Adjunct Instructor at NC Central University.

Nishith Khandwala is a co-founder of Bunkerhill Health, a clinical trials network and distribution platform for AI algorithms for medical imaging. He holds a bachelor's and master's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he worked on AI research projects involving weak supervision and healthcare. Nishith has also been a teaching assistant for graduate-level AI courses at Stanford.

Meagan Day is a Director of Engineering at athenahealth. She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science as well as a B.S. in Mathematics from UMass Amherst, where she discovered her passion for computer science and software engineering. After completing her M.S. she joined athenahealth as a software developer, where today she thinks about interoperability in healthcare IT, distributed computing and bulk data movement, building effective and engaged Agile teams, equitable hiring practices, and diversity and inclusion in software engineering.

Rahul Pandita is a senior research scientist at Phase Change Software. His primary research interests are in data science and automated software engineering. He specifically works in the area of program comprehension targeted towards improving developer/tester/end-user productivity. Previously, Rahul worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Department of Computer Science NCSU working with Dr. Laurie Williams and Dr. Munindar Singh. He received his PhD. from NCSU in Computer Science.

Alex Passos is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Google Research. He is working on natural language problems, around model controllability, grounding, retrieval-based models, etc. Before he was the area tech lead responsible for TensorFlow, and even before that he went to graduate school and got a PhD advised by Andrew McCallum at UMass.

David Darais is a Principal Scientist at Galois, Inc., where he builds programming languages and analysis tools which help programmers build reliable software. In particular, these languages and tools are designed for security-sensitive settings, and when applied, result in systems which are immune to large classes of defects. David received his BS from the University of Utah, MS from Harvard University, Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, and was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont before joining Galois.

Jackie Lee is the co-founder and former CTO of Silo. She developed the core products, built the engineering team, and helped take the company to series A. Currently, she is a science advisor for a mental health startup — Neolth. Before founding Silo, she was the lead data scientist at Virta, and a ML engineer at Kite. She joined both companies when there were fewer than 30 and 10 employees respectively. She received her Ph.D. from MIT, and her research area was in the intersection of natural language processing, speech recognition, and cognitive science.