Schedule

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• 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)

• Read Et al. for all: Citations as a Tool for Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Justice 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)

• Skim the fellowship advice from Harvard and by MIT (click on left-pane links).
• Peruse the list of fellowships compiled by John Girash, by CMU, and by NC State
• Watch The Craft of Writing Effectively by Larry McEnerney and answer reflection questions (suggestion: organize a watch party with peers in the SEC).

In Class:

• Discussion of effective scientific writing
• Panel with the SEAS Graduate Writing Advisor Suzanne Smith, and with Ph.D. students Thierry Tambe, Eura Shin, Ike Lage and Samuel Hsia.

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: [slides]

• How to communicate about weekly progress with your collaborators

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 Negative-Weight Single-Source Shortest Paths in Near-linear Time. Note that the paper is far 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]

• Guest: Professor Salil Vadhan
• Reflect on your own strategy reading more theoretical papers
• Practice new strategies on Lower bounds for maximal matchings and maximal independent sets

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)

• If you wrote last week’s report on your current research, ask your advisor(s) for feedback. If you wrote it about another topic, ask the course staff for feedback.
• Read Computing and Accountability and answer reflection questions.

In Class: [slides]

• Guest: Dr. Trystan Goetze (Embedded EthiCS)

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read:
  • How to make the most out of your Ph.D: A guide from current to incoming students
  • Graduate Student Adjustment to Academic Life: A Four-Stage Framework (Note: the words competent/incompetent in the article are technical jargon from the learning and cognition literature. As such, you should not interpret them using their colloquial meanings; we instead encourage you to think of these terms more as novice/expert).
• Answer reflection questions, and think of questions to ask the panel

In Class: [slides]

• Panel on debugging unhealthy self-expectations with: Bahareh Tolooshams, James Larisch, Eura Shin, and Paula Rodriguez Diaz
• Special note: no faculty present

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
• Guests: Professors James Mickens, Elena Glassman, Stephen Chong, and Flavio du Pin Calmon.

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read Pages 1-10 of Dealing with Social Isolation to Minimize Doctoral Attrition – A Four Stage Framework and answer reflection questions.

In Class: [slides]

• Panel on managing advising relationships with: Zana Buçinca, Sanket Shah, Eura Shin, and Chelse Swoopes.
• 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: [slides] Discussion about,

• 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?

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.

In Class: [slides: part 1]

• Guests: Sadé Abraham and Dr. Margaret Rennix

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read: Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling. What can Pixar teach you about communicating your research?
• Prepare a 5-min presentation (with slides) about your current research project, or a project you’ve worked on before, or a research paper you enjoy. Assume a general audience that has some (but not a lot of) familiarity with CS (e.g. first-year college students interested in CS).

In Class: [slides]

• Learn how to present your research to general audiences
• Practice presenting to your peers

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Revise your talk based on your peers’ feedback and the class-wide discussion about story-telling. This time, you will be given 10min to present.

In Class:

• The experiences of international and non-native English speakers in US-based conferences.
• A continuation of last class.

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read two of the articles below:
  • IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation
  • The Punch-Card Conspiracy
  • How human-centered tech can beat COVID-19 through contact tracing
  • Funding Black and Latinx community institutions is the key to vaccine equity
  • We Need More, Not Fewer, Collaborations With Tech Companies
  • The Promise of the Sharing Economy among Disadvantaged Communities
• Answer the reflection questions on canvas.

In Class:

• Guest: Professor Mary Gray

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read:
  • The Secret History of Women in Coding
  • Silent Technical Privilege
  • Invisible Women: The Plough Hypothesis (Chapter 7)
• Answer reflection questions on canvas.

In Class: [slides]

• Discussion of barriers leading to equitable and fair participatory design
• Guest: Dr. Weiwei Pan

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read:
  • Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps
  • Horror Stories from Math:
    • A Close Call - How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed
    • The Qual
    • Winning by Impression
    • A View of Mathematics from Behind the Veil
• Answer the reflection questions

In Class: [slides]

• Analysis of the above cases and of barriers to participatory design using formal frameworks
• Guest: Dr. Weiwei Pan

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read:
  • The ins and outs of reviewing
  • How NOT to review a paper The tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer
  • Mistakes Reviewers Make
  • Dear Area Chairs (ACs)
• Answer reflection questions
• Sign up to read and review one of three papers (spend < 1hr on this)

In Class: [slides]

• Discuss, what makes a “good” vs. “bad” review?
• Simulate the reviewing process (e.g. the roles of the area chairs, meta-reviewers, etc.)

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Watch:
  • 1:15-14:50 and 36:05-45:45 of Professor Sapolsky’s lecture on depression
  • Why Do Depression and Anxiety Go Together?
• Read: pages 18-15 from Harvard’s Report from the Task Force on Managing Student Mental Health
• Answer the reflection questions

In Class:

• Guests: Olivia Fitzpatrick and Daniel Coppersmith
• Workshop on mental health
• Special note: no faculty present

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Read:
  • Validation in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
  • The Jobs I Didn’t See: My Misconceptions of the Academic Job Market by Evan Peck
  • Most Ph.D.s aren’t professors. Everything one can do other than be… by Amy J. Ko
• Answer the reflection questions

In Class: [slides]

• Part 1: Discussion of how to support your peers
• Part 2: Life after the Ph.D.

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Revisit this list of worries and implicit expectations we came up with as a class on our first day.
• Answer the reflection questions

In Class:

• Guests: Siddharth Swaroop, Radhika Ghosal, Eura Shin, and Jakob Troidl.
• Special note: no faculty present

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• None

In Class: [slides]

• Guests: Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, Dr. Paula Nicole Booke, and Professors Fernanda Viegas, James Mickens, and Flavio Calmon.

Pre-class Work: (instructions on canvas)

• Revise the slides you made for the first class to include a sentence about (a) something you learned about yourself over the past year, and (b) a direction you’re excited to grow in for the next year.

In Class:

• Reflect on the first year of the Ph.D., topics discussed over the course of CS290, and how we can continue building an inclusive and supportive community at Harvard and beyond.