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Matt: what will happen to your graduate students?
My name is Matt, so I feel qualified to reply. My first joke thought was: "I bet Google will be happy to hire them too." A moment later I realized it's probably true.
Big loss for Harvard. Matt Welsh is a fantastic teacher.
Agreed, I had him as well and he was a big inspiration. Perhaps the beginning of a broader shift in industry vs. academia?
I think it is a testament to how interesting the work in our field is.
I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc.
If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.
"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.)..." I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc. If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.
However, the best place to do research is within academia (large research universities), where there is a very complete and strong infrastructure to do research. Yes, the system is broken in many ways, but it is still the best.
People who really have a strong passion for teaching and not as much interest in research go teach at universities that specialize in teaching more than in research e.g. Reed College.
Last, at a sufficiently advanced level teaching and research are indistinguishable.
This sucks for the world, because the research in these things that Google does doesn't really escape to advance the state of the art elsewhere.
Short version: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google) is because I want to be an engineer and not an academic.
"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.)..." I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc. If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.
Trying to deal with plagiarism (which even goes as far as assignments posted on RentACoder), using ancient marking systems (WebCT is well and truly evil), handling students who obviously don't care at all but feel entitled and so on.
He's describing something that was the biggest factor for me not deciding to go back to school. I came to Google and started working on search engine spam. I also periodically read papers on "Adversarial Information Retrieval" as it is called in the literature. Only a handful of the papers I read had useful ideas, and I don't think there's anything that can really be done to improve the situation. There are certain t…
"...overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.)..." I feel like a professor shouldn't consider teaching "overhead". If you're teaching classes, you should be putting at least as much effort into research as teaching. Prof != post-doc. If your passion is in research, then a move to industry (or post-doc) sounds like a good choice.
He may be complaining about all the overhead that goes with teaching rather than the teaching itself. I'm tutoring this semester for a Data Structures course and a painfully large portion of the time is spent dealing with things that really aren't teaching. Trying to deal with plagiarism (which even goes as far as assignments posted on RentACoder), using ancient marking systems (WebCT is well and truly evil), handlin…
Still, in my experience (which is nothing special, 4 years undergrad, in second year of masters) there are definitely professors who consider teaching an unfortunate side-requirement of their research. And I don't think it's unique to my school. I think this sucks.
I have been working as a teacher's assistant for a few semesters now, and I hear what you're saying about students who really don't care. I think especially in engineering, you get students who chose the major just because they got good grades in math and science and heard engineering pays well. Then those students complain when you ask them to work hard (or even just work).
Sidenote: WebCT :( haha. My school paid (and will continue to pay) a ridiculous amount for some enterprise course scheduling/billing/etc. software that would have been a great project in software engineering (e.g. large project management). All while we're having major budget issues.