9 February 2004Teaching Professional Skills to Our Students
When I was a PhD students at the University of Sussex, nobody explicitly told my fellow students and I how to go about writing a scientific paper, giving a scientific talk and refereeing a paper. I was lucky enough to have an excellent role model in all of these activites, viz. my supervisor Matthew Hennessy, and to be a PhD student at Sussex at a very exciting time. (I might post some recollections from those years at some point.) Matthew made all of us jump at the deep end by sending us to conferences to present our joint papers, and not going himself. There was no doubt that we had to deliver the talks ourselves!
These days, many PhD programmes include courses in which these basic professional skills are addressed. (See, e.g, Olivier Danvy's talks to the BRICS PhD students, and the course given by Jakob Stoustrup in Aalborg.) My modest opinion is that all PhD programmmes should include such courses, as our students should realize that being able to write good papers and to give good talks enhances their career prospects. Still, I often attend talks at conferences or seminar series that can only be classified as below par, if not altogether bad.
For what it's worth, I have collected my views on the basic skills mentioned above in three sets of slides that I am again using this semester for the course Professional Communication in Computer Science that I am giving to our sixth semester computer science students. You may find the latest version of these slides at
They are part of a little crusade to eradicate the badly written paper and the badly delivered talk from my field of computer science. Since the advice we give others is often the one we ourselves need, I hope to start by giving better talks and writing better papers myself. Of course, this assumes that I'll have something to talk or write about - a non-trivial assumption.Comments on the above slides are most welcome.
Last modified: Sunday, 08-Feb-2004 17:27:11 CET.