Comments on academia, research, and society
If there is one thing I wished more of my fellow academic peers would understand when working with industry, it is this: You should
Price for value created, not for costs incurred.
Many professors, when asked about the price of some proposed work, will calculate the direct labor costs needed for the project, add some university overhead or other margin, and then quote the industry partner the resulting costs as the project’s price.
Continue reading “Price for Value, not for Costs”My Twitter feed is alight with comments on Google’s six-month “career” certificate, which, according to this SVP, Google will treat as equivalent to a four-year Bachelor’s degree. Predictably, a large number of comments are from students who conclude from their own disappointed experience that all college programs are crap. They cheer on Google. Also predictably, I didn’t see a single academic professional join and comment in the discussion.
Continue reading “The Place of Professional Certificates and the Significance of an Academic Degree”There are lots of infographics on the web of how a professor spends their time, and they mostly miss the point. At the core, and after ten years of living it, I feel confident to say that it really is three roles that a professor in Germany has to play to be successful. I also have to say that it is pretty hard to be good at all three of them. These roles are:
Continue reading “The Three Hats of a Professor in Germany”From current observations, I would like to suggest a new law of hiring professors:
Continue reading “Hiring Machine Learning Professors Fast to Catch-up Short-Term Will Make You Fall Behind Long-Term”Hiring professors fast to catch-up short-term will make you fall behind long-term.
Any non-trivial university has a legal department, often several (at least one for matters of teaching and one for matters of fundraising). The legal department concerned with teaching has to protect the university from lawsuits by students. By extension, this department protects students from professors who ask too much of them. Often, there may be good reasons for this. Sometimes it gets in the way of effective teaching.
Continue reading “How Software Engineering Teaching and the Legal Department Collide”During a trip to Porto’s Ceija I was able to confirm that one of the professorial caste’s most cherished yet elusive objects does exist: The conceptual machine.
In this case, it is a 3D metal printer, and it printed this piece of hardware (and many others); this one took about 12h to finish.
At the doctor’s office, the nurse said:
“Oh, you are a professor! That is so crazy!”
I had to agree.
PS: I understand that this post may feel facetious to some. To me it is comic relief that I want to share with similarly inflicted colleagues.
I received five somewhat random review requests this morning, from the same journal, suggesting to me that the editor finds it hard to acquire reviewers for submissions. I pity the editor and feel bad for them (but they really should stop working for Elsevier). In any case, I five times essentially provided the same response, which is:
I just read this review of how professors spend their time while working. It struck me that a key component that I spend a substantial amount of time and energy on is missing: Fund raising. Here is a visual summary of the article courtesy of someone on reddit:
I first looked through other practices like “letter writing” and “research development” but these require no time at all so I don’t think that’s where fund raising is hiding.
I then thought that perhaps fundraising hides in meetings, making fund raising talking to industry (rather than grant proposal writing). Here is what the article says about meetings:
Germany is the best place I know to be a professor if you value your independence. Your rights have been codified in the German Basic Law (Constitution) and no dean can tell you what to do. You are your own person.
On the downside, German professors and universities have been (for the most part) blissfully ignorant of how the rest of the world evaluates universities. Common sentiments in computer science are that “Journal publications are for wimps, real researchers publish in the leading conferences” and “University evaluations? Those are all fraudulent, focusing on crappy criteria that have no connection with reality”.
Some of these critiques are proper. For example, almost all German universities are public universites and many have a unique and positive symbiosis with industry, fueling Germany’s economic growth—where is that being accounted for in these rankings? But for the most part, Germany’s hesitance to join the international ranking game has been harmful.
In one experiment, two German universities recently decided to report their numbers to the Times Higher Education (T.H.E.) ranking with the goal of optimizing their rank. That is nothing uncommon, Northeastern University, for example, has undertaken a multi-year effort to game the US News and World report ranking, much to their benefit, apparently.
Continue reading “German Universities to Take University Rankings Serious”