BRIANNA BLASER: Excellent.
It looks like it's quieted down.
So I'm going to go ahead and get started.
Thanks, everybody, for joining us today.
I want to remind you that we have captioning available
if you need it.
So you can go to the bottom of your screen
and you should be able to find a place to turn on captions.
So again, I'm glad everybody could join us today
to think about graduate school and applying
for graduate school.
And so here's what we're going to do.
Our AccessComputing PI Richard Ladner
is with us today and he is going to share
some about his experiences and suggestions
about applying to graduate school.
And then we'll have a panel discussion
with some current graduate students.
So we have Anna Kirkpatrick from Georgia Tech,
Ather Sharif, who's a graduate student here at UW,
and Liia Butler, who is a graduate student
at the University of Illinois.
So we'll be hearing from them in a little bit,
but for right now, I will turn it over to Richard.
RICHARD LADNER: Great.
Great to see you all.
I have some slides I'm going to show.
Second.
Everybody see those OK?
Great.
BRIANNA BLASER: Yep.
RICHARD LADNER: And as I go along here, please,
if you have a question, just turn on your microphone
and ask it.
Or, Brianna, can you just alert me
if somebody has a question by holding their hand up
or something like that?
BRIANNA BLASER: Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
RICHARD LADNER: There's a way to do that on Zoom.
So today I'm just going to talk about graduate school
generally, not just PhD programs but all kinds of programs
that are graduate level.
I know our three panelists are PhD students
so that's kind of awesome so that'll dig deep on that.
So I might go more slowly over that--
I mean fast over the PhD part.
And also, the panelists might have some thoughts as well.
So let's go.
There I am, Professor Emeritus at the University
of Washington, and our panel Anna, Ather, and Liia.
Really excited to meet all of you.
The first part I'm going to about why grad school at all.
And hopefully that'll answer some of your questions.
And then I'll talk about different types and research
careers and the steps you need to get there.
I might go through that--
that's a great question for our three panelists
so I might have their description for how
they prepared for their graduate program.
And then the panel.
If you like-- if you think about the undergraduate major,
you could be computer science or information science
or information technology, these are just getting your foot
in the door in terms of knowledge
about computer science or information technology or data
science or any of the fields that you could be in.
And so the graduate degree just opens up new doors.
You can advance in your career, you
can do more advanced development if you're a developer,
or you could get into real research,
or you could do a university teaching and research.
So once you have the graduate degree, masters or PhD,
you can go further.
And you will know more and be more proficient.
For advancement, if you have a job already, maybe
you're just going to get your bachelor's degree
and go work for Microsoft, say.
Well, they have a program at Microsoft
to support students going to school part time.
In fact, University Washington has a professional master's
program, which has maybe 150 students in it and half of them
are Microsoft employees.
So there are ways-- and many, many companies
have these perks, if you'd like, to do advancement.
You probably can't do a PhD that way
but you, definitely, there are master's degrees
around the country at other schools besides Washington.
In fact, there's online degrees like at Georgia Tech
as well, master's degrees at Georgia Tech,
that you could do completely online.
And your company might pay for it.
You could take a leave of absence from your company.
You really love your company and you
can request that and go to graduate school
for a year or two if you're doing the masters.
It's hard to take a leave of absence
to do a PhD because that takes more, like five, six,
seven years.
Some companies need people that are
close to the edge of research.
That is, that they're really inventors, if you like.
And Google certainly loves these people.
They've hired, I don't know, 10,000 PhDs probably
in the last 20 years.
And so you're right on the edge creating the next generation
of products.
You're not just maintaining a project
or maintaining a product.
Companies like these people that are really
advanced because they keep the company competitive.
So every company that is--
that you know about has a bunch of advanced development people
that are on the edge of research or doing research.
Some companies have research divisions like--
and so they're more like an academic department.
And I don't know why put IBM Research.
They've really become less and less important.
But Microsoft Research on the right there is--
it's probably 400 or 500 PhDs working on research.
It's the largest academic department in the world
and they're right across the lake from us.
I've worked with them quite a bit.
And so here, it's not so much products.
You're doing lots of innovation and more a scientific approach.
But some of the ideas, some of those things
will turn into real products.
In fact, something like Google Search
was initially just a research project at Stanford
and it became this huge company called Google.
At the university, there's teaching and research.
If you're at a research focused university
like University of Washington, then you're
primarily going to be doing research
and teaching will be a little bit more secondary.
If you're at a mid-sized university like Western
Washington University, which is kind of a regional university,
teaching is primary and then research is secondary.
And if you're at a small college,
and there's these elite small colleges like Reed College
in Oregon or Williams College in Massachusetts and so on,
there's probably 60 of these that are really elite
and really get fine undergraduates,
and teaching at one of those schools
is really enjoyable because the students are so smart
and you get to do research too.
In fact, it's probably required for promotion
to associate and full professor.
But the level of research and the amount of research
would be a lot less than at a research focused university.
And then of course, community colleges.
And some people love community college,
teaching at community colleges, because there's
no research involved at all.
You just want to keep up with your field.
But the students are varied.
They could be immigrants, they could
be people learning English as a second language,
they're older and more diverse, if you like.
And so some people just love that.
So those are the possible university teaching jobs
that you could get.
I'd just like to go through a few people
that I know who are professors and who have a disability.
The first here is Raja Kushalnagar
who is a professor at Gallaudet University.
He's deaf and Gallaudet, of course,
serves students who are deaf.
There's Annalu Waller who's a professor at the University
of Dundee in Scotland and she has cerebral palsy
and also it affects her speech as well.
She's just a wonderful faculty member there.
And Dundee is really famous in Europe
for their work in accessibility.
There's Nick Giudice at the University of Maine.
In fact, I just got an email from him
yesterday asking me a question about something.
He's totally blind and he is a professor--
full professor now--
in the School of Computer and Information Science.
I actually wrote a letter for him
for the full professor promotion so I'm
happy that he-- he's a very productive guy.
And then Chieko Asakawa who's an IBM Fellow
and works at IBM Tokyo research and she's famous worldwide
for her work in access to things like malls and open spaces
for people who are blind.
And she's blind herself.
So she's an amazing woman whose won lots of awards,
both in Japan and in the United States.
So there are some examples of some people
with disabilities that are way up there in the research world.
Oh, one more, Annie Anton.
I forgot about her.
She has a hidden disability.
She has ADHD, and she's open about that,
and she's a professor at the School of Interactive
Computing.
In fact, she was the chair of that school until recently.
She's an amazing woman.
Of course, I don't have to show you this slide.
It's a pie chart showing the different kinds of occupations
you can get in STEM fields.
STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
And 60% of jobs coming up between 2016 and 2026
are going to be in computing fields, computing occupations.
Only 22% engineers and then the percentages
get below 6% for life scientists,
physical scientists, social science,
and mathematical sciences.
So you're into right field.
There's going to be plenty of jobs out there for a long time.
I think the number of open positions
in the state of Washington is in the tens of thousands.
In fact, Amazon has about 30,000 positions open.
There are plenty of work out there.
One thought is, what are your career goals?
Why would you want to go to grad school
and so there'll be a little bit about that.
But there's things beyond just learning stuff.
Do you want to be a technical whiz?
Do you want to just be somebody--
and there are technical tracks at all these companies
that are parallel to management tracks
where top engineers at Microsoft make huge salaries.
Of course, your incoming salary is not going to be--
I mean, it'll be substantial, probably $100,000,
between $80,000 and $100,000, but as you move up
you're making a lot more money.
And then you could get into leadership.
So that might be more on the management side.
Many technical people move to management.
Even here at the University, we have deans and chairs
and directors and stuff like that so they're
doing a lot of management and a lot less teaching and research.
As you progress through your career, your goals will change.
You might just be so technical--
I want to do all this programming,
I want to develop stuff--
and then later on realized that, oh, I kind of like
this management stuff, maybe I'll
do something in that space.
I've seen that happen to a lot of people.
Some of them go back to being technical after they
find out, well, maybe this management isn't so much fun
after all.
When you go to grad school, don't just go to school.
Do some internships in companies so you find out
what work like that is.
Microsoft, Google, all the big companies
have internship programs for people that are PhD students
or are master's students.
Keep that in mind.
And that would be primarily in the summer.
Here are the types of education.
Hopefully, I got some--
our panelists got some thoughts over this as well.
Types of graduate-- there's a professional master's,
full time master's, fifth-year master's, and a PhD.
So the fifth year master's, I'll just
briefly say, that's combined bachelor MS degree.
MIT has such a thing, University Washington has such a thing.
So there are ways to go for five years
and get a master's degree.
Maybe six years or 5 and 1/2 years.
So you get the bachelor's along the way to the master's degree.
And that's primarily taking courses.
It's not so much doing research.
So for the professional masters, this is for part time.
You're already working and so you do your part time work.
It could be online or it could be in the evening.
I don't have the online on there.
I should have added that because of the Georgia Tech program.
And it's usually courses only, no thesis.
It could be paid for by the company.
I think Microsoft has $7,500 per year per employee on request.
Other companies don't do that.
Definitely ask that question when you go to a company,
if they support education.
It could take two to four years because you're
doing it part time.
Some examples are University of Washington, Stanford, UCLA.
And I should add Georgia Tech with their,
I know if we call it a professional master's program,
their online program.
It could be thought of that way.
Full time master's, that's one or two years,
depends on the program.
You're probably not working at the same time
because this will be intensive and it could require a thesis
but at least a large project so you get some project
experience.
It's not necessary to apply to a PhD program
to get a master's first.
You could go straight to the PhD program.
In fact, at the University in Washington,
you can apply to our PhD program and we
don't have a master's program except
for our professional master's program.
But as you proceed through getting your PhD,
you'd get the master's along the way.
The fifth-year master's I already talked about.
And there are examples, I mentioned,
at MIT and University of Washington.
It's typically full time.
It's not part time.
And students can take graduate courses
earlier than they might otherwise,
like in their fourth year, and a course
will count for either the bachelor's or the master's
depending on-- won't count for both.
And so you have to add up--
the credits would be more than the number of credits just
for a bachelor's.
It would be bachelor's plus master's.
In the quarter system, it's 180 credits plus another 40
I think.
You could do research as well.
I supervised some research for fifth-year master's students.
And that could be for credit-- academic credit-- as well.
So PhD, hmmm, that's the big one,
and that's where our three panelists are in PhD programs.
Usually takes five to eight years full time.
I don't know of anybody that's got a PhD working part
time in my 50 years at the University of Washington.
It may take less time if you already have a master's degree
and have some research under your belt. The courses,
you take courses the first couple of years,
but then no more courses and you're
just doing seminars and your own research.
Part of a research team, perhaps,
supervised by a faculty member.
As I mentioned earlier, you would
get your master's degree along the way
by passing some milestones.
Students, typically, are fully funded, are PhD students.
Either with fellowships, with teaching assistantships,
or research internships.
So we have about 300--
I think we have 300 PhD students now
at the University of Washington.
Somewhere around there.
Maybe 250.
Almost all of them are fully funded with one of these.
These funded positions are typically 50%.
That is, they pay at a 50% rate not 100%.
So it's not like--
and the work you do, for example, fellowship,
you're not paid to do anything, you just get the fellowship.
For teaching assistants, you wouldn't work more than 20
hours a week for that.
Or for a research assistantship, that would be the same.
At least the research assistantship
would add to your research and so might
be part of your dissertation.
Here are some milestones, PhD milestones.
Well, you've got to get in.
You have to apply and be accepted.
After two years, typically, there's
some kind of qualifier, qualifying.
It could be an exam, a written exam, an oral exam,
it could be just a project.
You have to complete a certain number of courses.
At University of Washington--
they change the rules every time,
I don't even know what they are now-- but maybe
about six courses plus a project, a research project.
The research project doesn't have to be a publication.
It could be but it has to be substantial so that people
feel that you can do research.
So you get past this qualifier and the faculty
as a whole thinks that that person can do the research
to finish a PhD.
If you don't get past the qualifier,
then you'll drop out.
You can still get a master's degree perhaps
but it's kind of this milestone that where the faculty agrees,
yep, you can do it.
You have to settle sometime on a dissertation advisor.
That could be in the first year, second year, third year.
People often switch dissertation advisors,
sometimes they have co advisors, more than one,
and it's a very individual decision.
That might be a good question for our panelists to ask them
how they're supervised.
You have to do a dissertation proposal,
you have to submit a dissertation,
and give some kind of dissertation defense.
Typically, the defense is really not a defense, it's more like,
this is what I did and why.
And then people bless you and you are on your way.
In that last year doing your dissertation,
that's when you look for jobs and that's
when you have to decide what you want to do.
I'm working with several students
now, not necessarily all at the University of Washington, who
are just finishing their degrees and they're
looking for jobs, both of them academic jobs.
So what about research careers?
You've got to be into innovation,
creating new technology, creating new model
for how things work.
So that would be less technology.
It could be very scientific, understanding what's
been done before, evaluating some new technology,
proving a theorem.
That's what I did for my dissertation was
prove a number of theorems.
That's when I was doing mathematics.
I think Anna might appreciate-- you'll
have to read my dissertation, Anna, someday.
No, you don't.
Areas of research.
There's so many in computer science.
Here's just a list of some.
Theory, architecture, graphics, databases,
programming languages, computer vision, graphics, systems
and networks--
the University of Washington's famous in that area--
artificial intelligence, which is
kind of the hot field with machine learning,
human computer interaction, which is more
what I do nowadays, robotics.
And then applications to the sciences or other fields,
like data science or computational
biology and many, many others.
Depending on the institution you go to,
you'll pick an area that you want
to work in and find a faculty member or faculty
members to work with.
There's different kinds of research.
Building a working system and evaluating it.
We do a lot of that at the University of Washington
with our systems group.
Build a prototype and evaluate it.
That's the more typical.
Study computing technology as it affects people.
That's HCI, Human Computer Interaction.
So there's different kinds of research project.
There's not just like, oh, I have to come up
with this hypothesis.
I have to come up with this proof.
You know what I mean?
It's not always looking like social science research,
although some computer science research does look
like social science research.
Now, how do I get there?
How am I doing for time, Brianna?
BRIANNA BLASER: You've got about seven minute.
RICHARD LADNER: Seven minutes.
OK.
We're getting there.
Well, you're an undergraduate, what do you do?
Well, you should be taking rigorous courses and do well.
That's critical because that's your foundation
that you're building on.
So do take hard courses and do well in them.
If you can do an undergraduate research project,
that's really important because that's
really noticed on an application that you've
done something, accomplished something, and some professor
will write about your research project and how well you did.
Study for and take the GRE.
Not so much anymore.
University of Washington, I believe, it's optional.
At UC Berkeley it's now been abandoned.
So that one you just have to look at the institution
to see if you really need to take the GRE.
It's really going out of favor very quickly actually.
But it depends on the institution
so keep that in mind.
Get to know faculty members who can write
you letters of recommendation.
Those letters of recommendation are so important.
That's where you have those undergraduate research
projects to help you get more involved
with the research that's done by faculty members.
Letters from graduate students usually don't count.
You want to have faculty members.
And then find an interest to focus on.
It doesn't have to be your final interest.
It's something that you feel like you'd
like to go into because you're going
to write about an interest in your statement--
statement of purpose, if you'd like,
for your graduate application.
And when you arrive at graduate school you'll find out,
maybe I don't want to do that, I switched, and change areas.
And that's fairly common as well.
Although, it might take an extra year of work
to finish your degree, it's worth
it if you find the thing what your real passion is.
Undergraduate research.
Hopefully you guys--
I know some of you already have done it in our little group
here.
So during the academic year, you can work on research.
I've worked with maybe 100 undergraduates
in my career on different research projects.
Quite often you could do it for academic credit.
We have a, I'm not call it course,
but we have a number where you can sign up and get
academic credit for that--
for that work.
And then there's the summer research internships
and industry internships.
Here are some research internships
that I know about that--
I know Aaron Howard just had did a CRA DREU
program this past summer funded by AccessComputing.
There's also these NSF REU sites.
And so you can go through those and see if you might
be interested in one of those.
That's where there's a program at a university that
brings in maybe 10 students during the summer
and they work as a team and do research in a particular area.
So look for those, and there's usually
a bunch on computer science and you
can search through the NSF REU website
to see if there's anything that interest you.
There's also research at nationals labs.
They have internships as well.
Like Lawrence Livermore labs or Argonne National Lab and Sandia
and so on.
Probably you have to be a citizen
because you have to go through some checking you out
by the FBI to sometimes work at these places.
We're going to-- these slides will be available in a PDF form
so you can click on these things later when you look at it.
For fellowships, the major one is this NSF graduate
fellowship.
Again, you have to be either a citizen or permanent resident
to apply for that.
One that's focused-- and that's a big one.
That's four years or is it three years now?
I can't remember.
Three?
Thank you.
Did you say three or four?
Three.
Three fingers up.
OK.
Thank you, Anna.
Is that three fingers or four fingers?
Three fingers.
You're kind of--
ANNA KIRKPATRICK: It's three years.
Three years of funding and a five year period.
RICHARD LADNER: Yeah.
Three years of funding in a five year period.
And then there's limited applications.
You can apply twice, I believe, now.
ANNA KIRKPATRICK: Yeah.
That's the deal.
You can only apply, at most, twice.
And generally, people apply their senior year of undergrad
and then they might try to reapply in their first year
of grad school.
But if you don't have a research advisor or a project,
I think you can apply your second year as well if you
have only applied once before.
I think.
RICHARD LADNER: I know NSF has really
increased the number of NSF graduate research fellowships
in the last 10 years and so there
is more opportunity for those, although it's very competitive.
Something a lot smaller, if you have a disability
you can apply for this Google Lime scholarship.
I think some of you have gotten those on this call.
And that's--
BRIANNA BLASER: The application for that is open
right now, too, by the way.
The Google Lime scholarship.
RICHARD LADNER: Yeah.
And you can be an undergraduate or a graduate student.
And I think it's $10,000 for nothing
and you become part of a cohort and Google
shepherds you around brown and gives you
some good pats on the back.
So $10,000 is not shabby.
Types of programs.
I already mentioned these earlier.
Could be computer science, computer engineering,
informatics, information schools.
Master's programs in data science, security, and HCI.
Probably for all these areas of data science,
these applied areas-- data science, security,
probably HCI--
you can get PhDs in those as well.
Deadlines are soon.
December and January for the following fall.
You do need to get your resume in shape,
your transcripts are going to be needed.
Usually those are-- your school well send them--
send the transcripts to the university
that you're applying to.
GRE scores.
I'll just put a question mark on that.
You have to check and see if the institution requires them.
You get a statement of purpose and three letters
of recommendation.
The letters of the recommendations
should be pretty glowing.
That's it for an application.
It seems not that much, but getting that together
and making your best story--
when you do your statement of purpose,
you might want to customize it for each university.
Not just one generic statement for everybody
because maybe there's some people
you'd like to work with at the particular place.
You should mention that in your statement of purpose.
So customized statements of purpose is a good idea.
There's some great programs.
These are the top programs, the top 12.
Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Berkeley
are all considered number one.
And then, I don't know, this ordering is kind of crazy.
I think they're all very good.
Illinois, Cornell, Washington, Georgia Tech,
Princeton, Texas, CalTech, and Michigan.
These are called the elite or top super 12 or whatever.
But there's a whole bunch of other ones.
I'm not going to read this huge list.
I didn't put them in alphabetical order or anything.
In fact, there might be duplicates
because I'm not very good at--
I should have put them in alphabetical order.
But these are great schools, all of these.
Some of these schools have information--
iSchools, some of them just computer science.
You just have to look and see if it suits
what you are interested in.
And so these are the top schools to apply to for the PhD.
I wanted-- just a few myths.
Grad school is too expensive.
No.
Because you're paid.
If you go to grad school, any of those schools
I've listed there, they will pay you to go to school.
Pay you in the sense of a TA, an RA,
or maybe potentially a fellowship.
Grad school is a lot of difficult classes.
I would say grad school is a few difficult classes.
It's not just taking classes.
It's the research component that's
so much bigger for the PhD.
And for the master's?
Yeah.
If you take a two year master's you
might have a lot of difficult classes.
But I know, at the University of Washington
in some of the other programs that have master's degrees,
there's some research focus on those.
It depends on the institution.
Again, you have to look and see what they do, what they offer.
I have to know what I want to study before I apply.
No, you don't.
Some people just wait for that inspiration, that spark.
I want to work on this.
What you do have to do is, in your statement of purpose,
you have to say, yeah, I want to study this
and show some enthusiasm, but with the understanding
that you might change after you get there.
I guess you have to have some idea of what you might
want to study but it doesn't have
to be your final commitment.
And grad school takes too long.
I went to grad school for what?
Five, six years and it did seem like a long time.
But I was busy the whole time.
It can take too long, and I know people do take much longer
than five or six years.
You can always apply to someplace--
you could talk to the advisor and say, well,
what's the average time that people take to finish?
Or you can, if you want to work with a Professor A,
you can look up A and look at their graduate students
and look how long they took.
And so that gives you some idea.
Some fields seem to take a lot longer than other fields.
I think if you're doing something that is--
really requires a lot of time you
should know that ahead of time.
I think plan at least five or six years.
Ah, the panel.
How'd I do on timing, Brianna?
BRIANNA BLASER: Not too bad.
RICHARD LADNER: Not too bad.
BRIANNA BLASER: Thanks, Richard.
Richard's going to hang around here, too,
so he'll be answer questions too as we go.
So I'm going to switch to our panel.
Again, we have Anna Kirkpatrick and Ather Sharif
and Liia Butler.
And if you all want to start by introducing yourself,
maybe telling us what you're doing, how you got there,
and something you wish you'd known
before you started grad school.
Anna, do you want to go first?
ANNA KIRKPATRICK: Sure.
Yeah.
My name is Anna Kirkpatrick.
I am in year number six of a PhD program at Georgia Tech hoping
to graduate this spring or summer but we will see.
My program is actually a strange interdisciplinary one
in the sense that it's only offered at a couple of schools
in the country.
It's called algorithms, combinatorics,
and optimization, and it is actually
an interdisciplinary program between math, computer science,
and industrial and systems engineering.
My own background is in mathematics.
I did an undergraduate degree in math
at the University of South Carolina.
I definitely ended up at Georgia Tech
in this pretty strong program in no small part
because I participated in three, four,
depending how you count it, different undergraduate
research projects while I was an undergrad.
And I had a great professor who mentored me
who I still talk to sometimes when I need advice who mentored
me on a couple of projects that got published
and that was really great for my application.
I will mention in the course of introducing myself
that I have a physical disability in the form
of a nervous system disorder.
I deal with chronic widespread musculoskeletal pain.
It's really painful for me to type or use a computer mouse.
I use a lot of assistive technology.
I definitely have some challenges
in terms of my writing being limited
and my computer input speeds are slower and it's definitely--
I've had to fight to get what I need
as well as to be given the leniency to work
at a pace that is sustainable.
I've also had some advising adventures.
If anyone-- I can share those if anyone is interested.
And what would I wish I had known?
That you should really look at a professor's record
before you sign up to be their advisee.
Really look at how long have they
been there, how many students have had they
graduated as PhD students?
So not just their publication record but how many
students have actually graduated with them.
And if possible talk to some of those people.
That would have kept me out of a situation
that I wish I would've avoided.
BRIANNA BLASER: Excellent.
Thanks.
Ather, do you want to introduce yourself?
ATHER SHARIF: Sure.
I can go next.
Can you all hear me OK?
Some my name's Ather.
I'm a third year PhD student over here at the University
to Washington.
My focus, my research focus, is in broader HCI human computer
interaction but focused on personalization
and accessibility.
I've been here for two years and I'm starting my third year.
I do have a mobility disability, a spinal cord injury.
And the thing that I wish that I had known about grad school,
it's sort of like what Anna said but more also--
more about the work life balance a little bit.
Grad school gets really busy and sometimes you
do that at the expense of other things.
It's very important to know what you're signing up for.
Just talk to other people, knowing what it's like,
and preparing yourself for it I think is really important.
I wish I knew that before.
That's it for myself.
BRIANNA BLASER: Ather, you got a master's
before you got your PhD.
Can you talk about why you made that decision?
ATHER SHARIF: For going for master's or for going for PhD?
BRIANNA BLASER: Either.
Why you got-- why you originally got a master's and then decided
you wanted to go get a PhD.
ATHER SHARIF: That's a great question.
If I kind of go back and recall--
I did my master's separately from the PhD program.
When I started my master's my focus was to go into industry.
I was not thinking about research.
I was just thinking about the market value
that I would have after I finished my master's program.
So I went to do my master's, that was a two year master's
program.
Very focused on industrial sense of way,
like developing your skill set and things like that,
increasing market value, your salary raises up immediately
before you get hired, you have much more chances to explore.
As Richard was saying in his slides,
there's many directions that you can go,
many, many paths open up.
PhD for me was a little bit of a different path.
I came to do this PhD program, first, because of Richard.
He was very convincing.
So that was that.
But I was-- there was one thing that
stood out when I was talking to different professors
and everyone.
Is that, when you're in a PhD program,
you don't graduate unless you've created knowledge
that was not existing before.
I think that, just that part, is just really exciting, knowing
that you're coming to this program with a passion
that you might have-- or if you don't, you
will change that and you'll find your passion eventually
in the program-- but when you do graduate, when you do get out
the door, you would have created something
that nobody in this world has ever created before.
It was just really exciting to me and I was just
really passionate about accessibility and the work I
was doing and I thought that if I was the first one
to do something, then--
and UW is a great school in terms of accessibility,
and there's great minds such as Richard.
If I can work with them and create something
that would just change the world and make the world a better
place then I would want to be here and want to do that.
BRIANNA BLASER: Awesome.
Thanks.
And Liia, do you want to introduce yourself?
LIIA BUTLER: Yeah.
Hi.
I'm Liia Butler.
I am a second year PhD student.
I also did my master's first at University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign.
Let's see, now I've had a little bit transition
from like software engineering and CS education to I'm
just wanting to do CS education right now, which has been fun.
I have ADHD and, let's see, what was the other thing?
One thing that I wish that I had known
before jumping into grad school is
it's actually a very real statement
that it's a very personal journey for each
and every one of you.
So take advantage of those times where
you can customize it to make you fit better
anywhere between the application process
to when you're actually there.
BRIANNA BLASER: But how-- what about your thoughts on why
did you initially do a master's and then decide to do a PhD?
LIIA BUTLER: Yeah.
My journey here has been a bit weird.
I actually started out a film and German double major,
which, by the way, if you have something crazy like that,
it's great to put in your statement of purpose
because even professors, years later, were like,
oh, yeah, you were the film and German person, weren't you?
I'm like, yep.
So I had changed my mind a lot about majors.
I was pretty sure that I wanted to do a PhD
and ultimately become a professor,
and luckily I haven't changed my mind about that since.
But I kind of wanted that master's buffer
to see what grad school is really like
but have a quick escape if it didn't work out.
Obviously, if you figure out that PhD isn't right for you,
you can still drop out.
But it was a little bit more comforting to me
to know that I had that space.
Kind of like an incubation period before I'm
a full PhD student.
BRIANNA BLASER: Awesome.
Can you all comment a little bit about applying
to graduate school and how you decided where to apply
and what that process was like.
Any accessibility issues you faced or difficulties?
ANNA KIRKPATRICK: Well, I certainly
have a few things to say there.
The choice about where to apply was largely
based on input I got from professors
I knew at my undergraduate institution.
So that's pretty straightforward.
I talked to people I respected in the department
and then narrowed down a list from there.
One of the things that actually narrowed things
down a little farther was I--
and remember, this was six, seven years ago
so the GRE was much more common.
In fact, GRE subject tests were pretty
common in math and adjacent programs,
which with my background, was where I was applying.
I looked through all the information about the GRE
and what accommodations were available and could not--
what I would have needed to actually take that test
and not have it cause a real symptom flare up and be really
harmful to my health was just not something
that was going to be available.
Even with a scribe sitting still looking at a paper or screen
or whatever for that long without my ergonomic setup,
without the ability to get up and move around,
it was just going to be bad.
So after talking to my undergraduate advisor
and talking it through with him, what I did was
I started emailing the program directors, the people who
were points of contact for the various schools
and asking if they would be willing to consider
my application without the GRE.
And not only did I not have to take
the GRE as a result of this, just about everyone agreed--
another thing, at the advice of my undergraduate advisor,
I did include a copy of my CV at that point, which,
because of the undergraduate research I'd done,
looked impressive enough that they wanted
to give me a second look.
Put it that way.
The other thing is that there were
a couple of places where I didn't
like the responses I got.
Even if they gave me permission, they
were rude or they brought up inappropriate concerns
or they--
I know, Liia, you're at University of Illinois,
I was talking to someone in school of math
who just sent me a really, really ablest response
basically outlining all the ways that being a PhD student
would be hard for me.
It was horrid.
And you know what?
I didn't apply there.
So that was actually really helpful
because I learned that wasn't a place I wanted to be,
in that particular department anyway,
and I saved myself an application fee.
I also got a few fee waivers out of the deal, by the way,
just by making personal ish contact with program directors.
There were a couple places where they, oh, sure you can do that,
and by the way, have a fee waiver.
Which I didn't objectively need or anything,
but they saw my record and wanted me to apply.
It was a really good litmus test in addition to helping
with the accessibility issue.
RICHARD LADNER: Can I just add about the fee waiver?
That's something that you can always request.
Some of these application fees are pretty expensive.
I think-- our school has some ability
to waive those so be sure to keep that in mind
if cost is a real issue.
BRIANNA BLASER: Ather or Liia, do
you want to add anything about your graduate school
application process?
LIIA BUTLER: I feel what Anna said
was perfect because I honestly probably
went about it the worst way of applying to grad school.
I was just all over the place submitting last minute.
There were times where I couldn't get my application
to go through because everybody's submitting December
15th 11:59 PM.
So just getting everything done and all together
and do your research because, luckily, it worked out
for me where coming to University of Illinois,
that was the one I did a little bit more research
on then the rest of the schools I was looking at.
And luckily, I was in a really good situation.
But obviously, the more time you put and prepare and at least
get something down and ready to go, most of those
places you can go back and revise and improve
your application.
But just getting something together as soon as possible
would have definitely helped me out.
ATHER SHARIF: I'll just add to that a little bit.
I think what Anna said and what Liia said,
it's just about perfect.
But at this point in time, there's been a lot of work
in how people are getting more aware of the underrepresented
minorities, underrepresented groups,
so they've started these programs--
and I've seen that come through from Stanford,
I've seen that come through at UC Berkeley as well--
where there are workshops that the universities are giving
and they will review your applications.
And they will also help you answer your questions
about what do you--
what should you do, how should you
write it, what do you expect, how are the reviewers looking
at it?
So those are things that are helpful.
If you are thinking of applying, then I
think it will be beneficial to make use of those workshops.
Of course, just being in touch with the professors who
are eventually going to be reviewing your application
or might be at the school that you're applying for
might be very helpful as well.
BRIANNA BLASER: I have--
thanks, Ather.
I have one more question I'm going to ask
and then I want to make sure that we
leave a chance for folks to ask some of your own questions.
So you can raise your hand or type questions in the chat
if you want to ask questions.
And I Gina already added a link there to information
about the NSF graduate research fellowship
program, which is great.
Thank you, Gina, for adding that there.
The last thing I wanted to ask, because this is something
I've had a lot of conversations with graduate students
about over the years, it's about the accommodations
that you get in graduate school.
And a lot of settings that are much more straightforward
as an undergraduate are not nearly as
straightforward and clear of what accommodations
you might need or be able to get as a graduate student.
So I'd love to hear about how that has worked for all of you.
ANNA KIRKPATRICK: Yeah.
So that's been an adventure.
On one hand, things get easier because they get less formal.
You get to have-- you get to know,
you get to form these professional relationships,
with professors and others in your department, you get to--
sometimes you start requesting accommodations
through channels other than the disability services office.
I've requested several things directly through my department
and that has been the better way to handle some of it.
But I have still been figuring it out, basically,
the whole time I've been here.
I came in with one set of ideas and didn't--
and some of it worked and some of it didn't and had to modify.
I'll tell you, it was in my fourth year
I got an ergonomic workstation for my office
that would have been really helpful the whole time.
I had no idea that it was an option.
I ended up being able to request an ergonomics evaluation
through the occupational health and safety here at Georgia Tech
and got someone who came out and spoke to me
and looked at my space and made recommendations, and then
the department actually purchased me
a really nice ergonomic workstation where I can--
I'm not in my office now, I'm in my apartment--
but when I'm in my office, I have a chair that can recline
quite a bit and the mon--
position the monitor arm so I can still see them,
I can still use my eye gaze and other inputs
from that recline position.
Really helpful for pain management.
I had-- it would've been helpful the whole time.
Part of it was my condition itself changed.
It does over time.
Who knows why.
It's not progressive but it's like what
is the most issue can shift.
And part of it was just that I had no idea.
And I only learned about that when I connected with a faculty
member with a disability here on campus who pointed me towards,
oh, yeah, there's this office you can request because you're
technically an employee.
I'm like a third time employee technically as a grad student
but grad students are employees so you
can request some of these services that
are available at employees, including
the ergonomics evaluation.
So just figuring out where to ask for things can be a jumble.
And I've worked a lot of stuff--
accommodations for my comprehensive exams
was a big one.
And I can-- there's a whole bunch of details
there that I could share.
But I worked that out myself in conversations
with my program director.
I did not go through the disability services office.
They had no clue what was going on.
Yeah.
I'll let other people talk.
But, yeah, it's very different in grad school.
BRIANNA BLASER: Liia, how about your experiences?
LIIA BUTLER: Yeah.
I'm going to end up echoing a lot of the same things
but just from my personal experience
that things they're always changing
and you figure out how some of your needs evolve not only--
just in your graduate experience in general.
For example, in your first two years
you take more courses and some of the courses, at least
for University of Illinois, they were both senior year
of undergrad and grad students were taking these courses
so it was still very lecture and test based.
So the typical accommodations, like getting extended time
for tests or distraction reduced environment or automated note
takers, those would obviously be a little bit more useful
towards the beginning.
And then as you kind of progress through grad school,
just being able to more--
learning how to communicate with your advisor
and even figuring out what you need yourself
because, again, grad school is a very wild and personal
experience.
So just talking to other people and taking the time
to figure out what's work for other people, what
might work for you, and just going from there.
So it just ends up being more general to more
personal in my experience.
BRIANNA BLASER: Great.
Ather?
ATHER SHARIF: Kind of like the same thing as has been said.
In undergrad or in a master's program, you're taking classes.
So you have internal deadlines.
It kind of makes sense at that point,
if you needed extra time, usually it's time and a half,
that's the rule they follow.
When it comes to grads--
and note takers as well.
And those are the accommodations that I needed in grad school.
In a PhD program when you're not taking classes
and your deadlines are mostly external, because you're
submitting paper deadlines, they don't get extended.
The paper deadlines stay the same.
The fellowship application deadline stayed the same.
And anything else that goes on is--
that doesn't move so that accommodation
doesn't apply that much.
It's unfortunate that way.
Note taking is, again, very, very good in terms of classes.
But when, as you move forward in your program, then you are--
then basically you're just meeting with your advisors,
you'll have lab meetings, you'll have
meetings with collaborators.
That's a tough-- that's a slightly difficult path
to navigate through when it comes to the disability
resources services or the DRs or whatever it's
called in other universities.
Generally, what I've done in the past is
I've just asked my advisors to take notes for me.
And they have done it because it's just the three of us.
I'm co-advised so there are two advisors and me.
So when we meet, I tell them to take notes for me
and they take notes for me and then they gave it to me.
It becomes a little bit individualized,
a little bit because you have to figure out
a way to do it in a different way, I would think.
Official accommodations, you have to get creative about it.
It's not-- it's not like it's impossible.
It's doable, it happens, but it sometimes
needs a little bit of creativity.
BRIANNA BLASER: I think, too--
the way you talked about that, Ather, too,
there's the human element of just asking somebody
to take notes.
And when you have those more personal connections
it's easier to do that sort of a thing.
So we do have a couple of minutes.
If anybody has a question, I'd love
to give you a chance to ask it in the chat
or by raising your hand.
RICHARD LADNER: I just--
BRIANNA BLASER: Richard?
RICHARD LADNER: I have a comment.
BRIANNA BLASER: Yeah.
RICHARD LADNER: Yeah.
What Anna said earlier was pretty important,
that when you're a student you go through the student students
with disabilities resource office or whatever it's called.
When you're a graduate student, you're
a student and an employee because you're either
a TA or an RA so there's another separate office.
And sometimes there aren't going to be that many people
with disabilities that need that kind--
those kinds of accommodations, employee like accommodations.
So the people in your department might not even know about it.
But this is where the self advocacy comes in
and you have to understand, oh, I'm an employee,
I an go through this other office.
And that's what Anna did, which was very smart.
But sometimes the people in your department
won't know things like that.
BRIANNA BLASER: That's a good point.
Erin, I see you have a question.
ERIN: Yeah.
So my question is mostly--
I am sitting on the corner of three different departments.
I got computer science, physics, and astronomy,
and it's like, how do I decide--
and what I want to research and what I want to do for my life
involves all three of those.
How do I decide which department I should apply to?
Or can I apply to all of them and just
get into one hopefully.
ANNA KIRKPATRICK: So I am in an interdisciplinary program
and sit on the corner of three departments,
and actually four because my work
actually involves biological applications.
So there are three in my program and then
I actually have a co advisor who's
in biomedical engineering.
So I can relate.
There's nothing wrong with applying to programs
in different fields.
It'd be kind of weird, I guess, to apply to multiple programs
at the same school, but I don't think it's forbidden.
I haven't heard of it.
But I-- certainly me and several of my peers in my program
applied to math departments, to computer science departments,
to operations research departments,
industrial engineering departments.
That's not uncommon.
I applied to this interdisciplinary program
and to math programs because that was really
all the background I had.
But I have friends and peers in my program
who applied to lots of different things
and then looked at the options.
Because once you get in, they will--
I mean, I don't know right now because of COVID,
but under normal circumstances, they'd invite you to come visit
and you get to talk to faculty and talk to students
and learn more about what really goes on in the department
and in the program which can help
you make a better informed decision than you can
when you're applying.
Obviously, you have to whittle down
how many places you're going to apply to.
You aren't going to--
don't do what my roommate did and apply to 30 places.
That will drive you insane as well as be really expensive.
But there's nothing wrong with applying to programs
in a couple different fields.
That's pretty common.
ATHER SHARIF: And I would just add to that a little bit.
I've known people who were in multiple departments
and their research kind of aligns
with multiple departments.
It's also good to think about and just
be smart about which department has more funding, which
department has more resources.
If one of them has more, I would go for that.
Also depends on the advisors as well.
Am I more close to one or the other?
Do I have better chemistry with one or the other?
And then I would just be there more.
Even though, at least at the University of Washington,
your main advisors--
your main advisor does not need to be in your program.
So that kind of doesn't really apply that much.
But in other places it might be the case.
Sometimes it's a good thing to consider
other things and a little bit of a broader thing.
ERIN: Thank you so much for mentioning that
because my current--
the research advisor I had for my DREU program
really wants me as a grad student,
but I know that their grad department
is super competitive.
So I'm like, maybe if I apply to three different grad programs
at UW I'll get into one and maybe he
can still be my advisor.
So thank you for mentioning that.
BRIANNA BLASER: Awesome.
Well, thank you for that question
and thank you all for joining us today
and to our panelists for sharing their time and experiences.
I want to make sure we're respectable of time.
We're a couple minutes over.
Thanks for joining us.
This was a great conversation.
And have a good rest of your day.
Bye.