Today, a group of graduating PhD students in our department met up to brief each other on what's new and hot in their respective fields, to remind each other of what's going on outside their respective specialties. The idea is that when interviewing for jobs, you have to hold up your end of a conversation with professors outside your specialty, and it helps to know a bit about their field.

To quote one professor in our department, "...there is a special circle of hell reserved for grad students interviewing for jobs who are unable to answer questions of the form, 'Oh, you're from UCSD. What's Professor so-and-so up to these days?'."

It took about six hours to get through talks from students working on Architecture, Bioinformatics, Systems, Graphics, Vision, Databases, Security, VLSI and more, and I'm not going to try to repeat any of the details, because frankly I'm numb. I will say that it was a great idea, and if you're a grad student and your department doesn't do something like this, you should start a tradition.

I will mention one thing: automatic detection and adaptation to network attacks is so hot right now.

Comments