I just had my first week of classes of my PhD. Since I also did my masters at the University at Buffalo, I came into the program with a fair amount of transfer credit and am taking the very few remaining classes this semester. This semester I am taking 1. how to be an effective instructor, 2. how to be an effective researcher, and 3. advanced computational linguistics. All of my classes seem really interesting, and the professors seem really chill. At least in two of my classes I’ve started to appreciate how relaxed graduate level professors can actually be.

I’ve put a few quotes in the quotes page of this site, but I think my favorites have been my Advanced Computational Linguistics Professor (600 level class) professor go, “literally any reason you email me that’s not “I don’t feel like coming to campus today” will count as an excused absence, and my Introduction to Graduate Studies Professor going, “emailing professors for research opportunities is like dating apps. If all you say is ‘whats up’ then you’re not going to get anywhere”.

So far my class on CS pedagogy, while it could be useful and on a high level is interesting, does seem the most boring. It might be that I don’t really plan to teach in my future, and I’m still getting used to reading research papers. This second point is the most time consuming part for me since I don’t know how to pick out the most important pieces of the paper, and then I have to reflect and synthesize the information as part of my grade. So far we’ve only read four papers and two seem to be on basically the same thing. I really hope we do get some moe variety.

I do feel the pressure this semester, mainly because of TAing Operating Systems. I don’t really remember a lot of the material, which is going to be tough when I hold office hours and field questions about the project. What I’ve been trying to do is study the material so that I can try and be on top of it. I’m also informally auditing the theory class to prep for next semester, which adds another thing I need to do. I think that after this semester everything will be better (at least I’ll have less threads pulling me in different directions).