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Vol.28 No.4, October 1996

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Issue

Common Ground for CHI Students at CHI 96
A CHI 96 Special Interest Group

This year at CHI 96 we organized the "Students at CHI" Special Interest Group (SIG). The SIG was designed as a session where all students attending CHI could meet and discuss graduate student issues. About thirty people attended the SIG. Most were Masters students and beginning Doctoral students, with some undergraduates and senior graduate students also in attendance.

The SIG began with three short talks presented by Ph.D. students who participated in the 1996 CHI Doctoral Consortium: Ben Anderson of Loughborough University, Mike Byrne of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Stacie Hibino of the University of Michigan. They presented brief overviews of their thesis topics, some important issues they had to consider, and words of wisdom about how to succeed in a Ph.D. program.

Here is a sampling of the recommendations for grad students:

• Look for issues or problems where some work has been done but nobody (or at least you) is really happy with current approaches or positions. Pick a thesis topic that excites you, because if you aren't excited about it who else will be?
  
• Read a lot. Go to conferences. Talk to people. But to finish in a finite time, remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.
  
• Working on interdisciplinary research means going outside your department for classes, research colleagues, and faculty for your thesis committee -- it takes extra effort, but it's worth it.
  
• What's the recipe -- what does a Ph.D. thesis look like in your department? Do you build something? Do you run experiments? What's expected of you?
  
• Know when to stop building -- be aware of what is needed to satisfy the recipe.
  
• Choose an advisor whose interests are fairly well aligned with yours and with whom you can get along.
  
• Grad school is intensive, but try to have a life as well.
  
• Try to break your thesis up into workable interesting pieces. This helps you write and publish papers as you progress. You can keep your committee members up to date by giving them copies of your papers. It also makes the final stage of thesis writing much easier since many chapters will be more or less finished already.
  
• The Ph.D. is a journey, with many routes to the final destination. People do different things along the way -- some directly related to their thesis, some not. You can choose the mode of transportation, so some people finish faster than others. There are roadside attractions, detours, and captivating forks in the road. A good guide (your thesis advisor) will point you in the right direction and keep you from going too far off the path.
  
• Beware of real pitfalls such as money and disillusionment. If you are excited about the journey and your advisor is interested in your topic, then you are well on your way to your Ph.D.!
  

The student presentations were a big success. The words of wisdom were especially appreciated, generating many worthwhile questions. Following the student presentations, we separated into groups of about six students for forty-five minutes of interactive, small group discussion. All of the groups had very active discussions. Topics for the group discussions were:

• What makes a good proposal or thesis?
• What makes a good advisor?
• Is it possible to have outside interests as a graduate student?
• What work are you doing or interested in doing?
• Is CHI by definition an interdisciplinary field, or should there be a department of CHI at universities?

Our goals for the SIG were diverse. The group discussions of student issues were valuable -- especially with students from different schools. Undergraduates and junior graduate students got an idea of the scope and content of a good thesis. Finally, the participants could find some familiar faces at this and future CHI conferences, having met one another at this SIG.

Graduate students have a common goal of doing good thesis research. Attendees at this SIG met on a common ground of shared goals and experiences in graduate school, encountering and building shared views and vocabularies. We feel that the SIG was a great success and think that it would be valuable to future student attendees to have another Students at CHI SIG at CHI 97 in Atlanta. Looking to the future!

Jennifer Kay
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
jennie@cs.cmu.edu, +1 412 268 6498

Casey Boyd
Dept of Computer Science,
University of Colorado,
cboyd@cs.colorado.edu;
+1-303-4924800,
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~cboyd/

Issue

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Vol.28 No.4, October 1996

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