[PRL] Friday/Saturday -- open house & PRL presence

[shivers at ccs.neu.edu]

PRL students:

The PhD Students Open House is tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday. All PRL
students should take it as a personal mission to be on hand & interact
with these guys.

The PhD admissions committee has accepted some really impressive students this
year. The only thing that can now go wrong is that these students might decide
to attend another program. It is *strongly* in your interest to have extremely
good people join the PhD program here, for several reasons:

  1. If high-impact researchers come out of the PRL group, it imbues
     *your* degree with reputation. That's the way things work.

  2. You get to spend a couple of years with these people, as co-students.
     The quality of your experience here, and a huge part of your education,
     will come from the time you spend with your fellow grad students. So you
     want to stack the deck in favor of good interactions.

  3. Trust me on this one: it is *astounding* the degree to which my
     grad-school mafia forms a useful network in my post-grad-school life.
     I went to grad school with Benjamin Pierce, Greg Morrisett,
     Scott Draves, Josh Bloch, and Kaifu Lee, to name a few. Again, it is
     *strongly* in your interests to pack PRL with the kind of people who
     will be high-impact researchers down the line. People who you will
     know well and whose technical capabilities you will trust when it
     is *your* turn to assemble a program committee for a workshop,
     or you need a journal article reviewed, or you need to assemble a
     thesis committee for your own student, or you want to start your own
     company.

So... PRL should stand together. Plus there will be free food.

The schedule for tomorrow & Saturday is at

    http://www.ccs.neu.edu/gradschool/phd_open_house.html

Some of you have specific assignments, but here is the general plan:

- Tomorrow is a good day simply to be *at school*, *in the lab*, *visible*
  and *available*.

- Specifically, students will be coming around 10:30. That's a good time
  to be around.

- Lunch is 12-1 in 366. Be there. Eat free food & interact.

- There's a general afternoon break in the schedule 3:15-4:15. Be in the lab,
  prepared to interact, describe your research, give demos if you can,
  and generally do your elevator-pitch thing.

- More hangout time 5:15-6, then a walk across campus to 450 Dodge for
  a free dinner.

There's more stuff on Saturday, but I won't lean on people to come in on their
weekend unless they are already planning to do so.

But you should consider it part of your grad-student "job" to be around
on Friday and interact. I am afraid that multiple PRL faculty are travelling,
so it is even more important for the grad students to be present.

Again, we have some excellent students coming in this year: several better
than Sam, and some even almost as good as Carl. (Or maybe I got that
backwards?) (I always confuse those two.) In any event, tomorrow is the single
best opportunity you'll have all year to influence the quality of the
environment in which we all are immersed, so do it up right.

    -A demain,
     Olin