I just got back from a conference in Big Sky, Montana. The conference hotel was up in the mountains at a ski resort, and although they were starting to get their first snow of the season, the slopes weren’t quite ready yet. The scenery was quit breathtaking (especially for someone from New Jersey), but unfortunately I only got to walk around and take pictures during one of the cloudy days. The conference itself was quite interesting. It was much busier than any of the others I’ve been to. I met a number of new interesting people, and got to see a few other familiar faces which was nice.

I won’t bore you with the details, but you can all imagine it as collection of groundbreaking work exploring how virtualization can be used to make computers more efficient, improve reliability, and generally save the world from all sorts of evil.

It’s pretty exciting, and having finished that after 4 years puts me in a good position to finish my PhD well ahead of the average in my department…

BS and PhD Production

I was first surprised to see just how many PhDs are being awarded. Almost 1800 new PhDs were produced last year, and the growth compared to the 90s and early 2000s is pretty staggering. The report suggests that the numbers will be even higher in the coming year, although the rate of increase is expected to drop.

On the other hand, undergraduate CS enrollment is doing terribly right now. I’d blame this partly on bad stereotypes about computer science, but mainly on most undergraduates having no real logical basis for why they choose a major.  Sadly, I’m not sure if that will ever change.

PhD Employment

Next let’s look at where all of these PhDs are going after they graduate. Industry took 52% of the new graduates, while about 33% went to academic departments. Of the academics, more than three quarters went to PhD granting departments.

The trends for employment type are fairly steady, except immediately following the dot com bust around 2001. I suspect that the current financial woes in this country will again lead to an increase headed towards academia, although if the depression/recession is widespread enough it may impact academic funding as well.  Hopefully universities will do well since a lot more people are going to suddenly want to go back to school or stay in grad school due to limited job options.  On the other hand, my own department is not hiring anyone this year because of budget cuts, so it may take a while before the money appears to make this happen.

Of course CS is a wide field, and the subdivisions within it can act very differently, so we can dig down a step deeper to see the breakdown of new job types by area within CS. It is interesting to see here that OS/Networking (my own area) is by far the largest proportion of graduates. If you were to condense multiple groups into the three main areas in my department: Systems, AI, and Theory, then the systems group is by far the largest with 835 members, compared to 201 and 112 in AI and Theory (although an additional 627 are other fields like graphics or “unknown”). Note: these numbers are for grads who got jobs in North America only.

Although OS/Networking is the biggest group, about 75% of its members go to industry, compared to 55% of AI and 50% of Theory graduates. I’m not too surprised by this since Systems is of course a more practical field that can be more readily applied to industry goals.  However, it is interesting that on an absolute scale, there were more AI than OS grads going into academia (57 vs 51) even though there are almost twice as many OS grads in total. Hopefully that means that if I want to get a job in academia it will be easier since there are a lot of grad students in my field, but not many that are as interested in academic jobs.

What About the Money?

So, will getting a PhD make you rich? I’m not sure about that yet, but here are a few of the salary numbers that I managed to dig up. The Taulbee survey includes information on starting faculty salaries.  The tenure track median salary was $85,000.  Non-tenure track researchers can expect $66K and postdocs around $47K.  These are 9 month salaries, so the yearly numbers will be a bit higher (of course that means you have to write some grants to get someone to pay you for those other months).  I haven’t been able to get a good sense of how this compares to industry salaries.  This set of slides from CRA reports salaries in the $75 to $120K a year range for industrial research labs.  I’m not sure how industrial job salaries increase over time, but the mean salary for full professors in CS departments was $130K for 9 months.

So fiscally speaking, it sounds like you can get a pretty good job with a PhD (even ignoring non monetary benefits like increased autonomy and job stability). On the other hand you have to first survive 6 or more years of grad school without starving.  I did some comparisons of expected retirement savings comparing the scenario where I get an academic job at age 28 versus having immediately gotten a lower paying job out of college.  Unfortunately, the results were inconclusive — one site said that Professor Tim would run out of cash at age 99 and starve to death while another expected him to surpass his less educated counterpart at age 42 and go on to live off of investment interest for all of eternity.  I guess only time will tell.

Disclaimer: Most of these figures have been lifted from the survey website, and I encourage you to go there to see their full results and analysis. I have tweaked a few of the images to try to make them more readable, and created the last image using their text data.

1. A good research notebook for informal notes and plans
2. A collaborative place to keep track of your results and general strategy
3. A way to keep track of your todos, meetings, and deadlines

Each of these has its own use, and none can completely cover for another. Here are my suggestions for each…

The Research Notebook

When I first started grad school I used a 99 cent notebook from the local drug store to keep all the notes about my project. It only survived for six months before the binding had fallen apart and I ran out of pages since I had been pulling them out to use for class notes as needed.

My current research notebook is a hardbound, 8.2 x 5.25, Moleskine with 240 sheets of graph paper. It costs about 15 times as much as the previous one, but it will definitely last a lot longer. Spending the extra couple bucks on it also has the psychological effect of making me automatically take better care of it. In fact, I’ve become rather attached to it.

I use the notebook to jot down quick notes or thoughts, as well as to plan out basic experiment and research plans. Of course it is also important to bring to meetings or seminars for taking down notes and comments. I do not record experimental results or exact implementation details in the notebook, as those are usually much better suited for an electronic format. Which leads us to…

The Wiki

I’ve become a huge fan of wikis. The point of a wiki is to be collaborative and make it trivial for both the original author and others to add comments and revisions. You can set up your own, but it’s even better to have a shared one for your lab. A lab wiki lets everyone keep track of what others are doing and gives a central, permanent place to store things such as experimental results and information useful to all lab members. Use it to quickly let others see your graphs and comment on them or to plan out your algorithms as a group.

Even if you use a shared wiki for your lab, you should keep a personal section where you can make your own notes. I find this particularly useful for recording basic code tricks, linux commands, installation notes, etc. The goal here is to make it as easy as possible for you to write down anything which might come in handy later. You think you’ll remember X in a year a month? No, you won’t. Trust me. So put it in your wiki and you can find it when you need it!

There are a ton of different wiki platforms to choose from. A simple one used by my lab which is convenient because it does not require any kind of special database is PmWiki. Even easier would be to use a wiki hosted by someone else such as pbwiki (as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich). Of course if you are doing super top secret research, you may want a more private place to keep your notes

If you don’t need something shared with others (or if it is just with a selected group) then you can also try something like backpack. It’s not exactly a wiki, but it provides an easy interface to create pages and add notes, images, and task lists to them. Pages can be shared with others or kept private.

The Calendar Task List

Now you have a place to take notes on your future plans and a spot to post your results, so what do you do next? Ah, well it seems you need a way to keep track of exactly that — your short term to do list. There are a lot of resources on the web for daily planning and keeping yourself organized. The GTD (Get Things Done) cult is gaining a lot of followers. I’ve read (most of) the book, and it is worth a look. The key idea is simple enough to implement on your own: have an organized place where you keep track of the list of “next steps” for each of your projects. These steps should be small ones, the idea being that if you always have a clear idea of your next manageable task, you are much more likely to do it than if your to do list for today just says “write Ph.D dissertation”.

There are a lot of online resources to help here. I’ve tried some larger life/project management solutions like Tracks and basecamp, but I think they are generally overkill for one person projects. Instead, I like the combination of an online calendar and to-do list. For the calendar, I use 30 Boxes since it has a very natural method for adding events (just type in “Meet advisor every thursday at 9am” and it will create the recurring appointment). I have been using Remember the Milk as a basic to-do list. It lets you easily create multiple lists and assign deadlines for each task to help you prioritize.

To make sure you actually use the calendar and list, you need to make them easy for you to see and edit. For this, I’ve been using netvibes to create a web portal which includes my calendar, to do lists, bookmarks, etc as embeddable widgets. Here’s what my page looks like:

From this one page I can then instantly see (and edit) my weekly calendar and my list of upcoming tasks. You can make your own page which includes calendars, bookmark lists, rss feeds, and all kinds of other content.

Conclusions

Sadly, even the most organized of us still have to spend most of our time actually doing the research which makes that organization worthwhile. There is also a certain danger of spending too much time getting organized and not enough time producing work to organize. In any case, there are undoubtedly ways that we can all further refine our work process so that we aren’t wasting time either figuring out what to do next or repeating what we’ve already done.

Resources

Wikis

• PmWiki – doesn’t need a database
  
• pbwiki – hosted by them

Calendars / To do lists

• 30 boxes – easy to use calendar
  
• Remember the Milk – nice to do list
  
• To do list roundup – more to do list options
  
• GDT Introduction – learn how to organize your life
  
• Tracks – full GTD system
• Basecamp – full project management solution
• Backpack – smaller scale self management with nice interface
• Netvibes – customizable start page made up of widgets

General Life Organization Resources

• 43 Folders
• Life Hack
  
• Lifehacker