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The 2022-2023 Teaching Materials for CS290
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The 2022-2023 Teaching Materials for CS290

This website contains the complete materials for Harvard’s 2022-2023 offering of CS290, the Seminar on Effective Research Practices & Academic Culture. This seminar is mandatory for all entering Computer Science (CS) doctoral students. Although the seminar was designed for CS doctoral students in mind, we believe these materials can be useful to the broader community. To learn more about our approach to the course, please also refer to:

If you do use our materials, please do reference our student-facing course website / these teaching materials, as well as our paper:

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@inproceedings{10.1145/3545945.3569751,
  author = {Yacoby, Yaniv and Girash, John and Parkes, David C.},
  title = {Empowering First-Year Computer Science Ph.D. Students to Create a Culture That Values Community and Mental Health},
  year = {2023},
  isbn = {9781450394314},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.12650.pdf},
  doi = {10.1145/3545945.3569751},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1},
  pages = {694–700},
  numpages = {7},
  keywords = {imposter phenomenon, social isolation in doctoral programs, mental health in doctoral programs, self-regulation, self-efficacy},
  location = {Toronto ON, Canada},
  series = {SIGCSE 2023}
}

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions, suggestions, or to let us know how you used these materials – we’d love to know!

The below figure (taken from our paper) motivates CS290 as an intervention to break undesirable feedback cycles in academic culture.

The cycle of isolation

Course Developers:

In addition to the main course developers listed above, we’ve had individual sessions contributed by a number of scholars, especially in the spring semester. Without them, this offering of the course would not be possible.

Class Structure: The course meets once a week for 120min during the fall and spring semesters. Classes generally followed this structure:

  1. Students are given time to socialize
  2. A brief recap of takeaways last week’s session (whole-class discussion)
  3. A brief presentation motivating today’s topic
  4. Alternating small-group exercises with whole-class discussion
  5. A brief survey on today’s session
  6. Some time at the end for socializing

Acknowledgments: There are a number of people we would like to acknowledge for helpful discussions and insights throughout the development of this offering of the course: Barbara Grosz, David Brooks, Finale Doshi-Velez, Isaac Lage, Krzysztof Gajos, Lillian Pentecost, Margo Seltzer, Sam Hsia, Udit Gupta, Weiwei Pan, Zana Buçinca.

This course draws on: Justine Sherry’s seminar Reading on Research, Weiwei Pan’s seminar Diversity, Inclusion and Leadership in Tech, Yaniv Yacoby’s workshop How to make the most out of your PhD.

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