Call for Participation: First PLDI Workshop on Red-Hot Topics in Faculty Mentoring (RTFM)
Call for Participation in the First PLDI Workshop
on
Red-Hot Topics in Faculty Mentoring (RTFM)
(aka Read the Faculty Manual)
https://pldi24.sigplan.org/home/rtfm-2024
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
co-located with PLDI'24 in Copenhagen, Denmark
We believe our community has come a long way in acknowledging that junior researchers need as much mentoring as they can get to prepare them for future jobs and help them succeed. The PLMW workshop series has made it possible for us to talk openly with students about the challenges and stresses facing graduate students: problems with advisors, paper rejections, mental health, and career planning. However, the same can’t be said about the challenges of being faculty: many junior faculty don’t feel comfortable discussing their doubts or asking for advice about how to manage a research group or build a tenure case, and not every junior professor is lucky enough to have a suitable mentor at their own institution to ask for help.
The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for full-time academics to comfortably share their experience in non-technical aspects related to faculty life. Not all such experiences are positive. Sometimes things don’t work out: PhD students change advisors, grants are rejected, topics go out of fashion. We believe many of the not-so-junior members of the community would love to learn about how “the magic is done” in other research groups, and what are the non-technical ingredients that enable long-term successful research and a happy work environment.
The workshop is targeting academic faculty of any seniority level, as well as senior PhD students and postdocs who have accepted faculty positions but have not officially started yet.
For the inaugural edition of the RTFM workshop, we are delighted to confirm the following speakers:
- Işıl Dillig (UT Austin), on running a research group
- Nate Foster (Cornell), on doing interdisciplinary research
- Ranjit Jhala (UCSD), on writing grants
- Peter Müller (ETH Zurich), on long-term research problem selection
The workshop will also feature three discussion panels on
- Getting tenure
- Recruiting and supporting students
- Work-life balance, service, and teaching
The workshop will conclude with a slot for one-on-one mentoring sessions.
RTFM@PLDI’24 organizers:
- Amal Ahmed (Northeastern University)
- Derek Dreyer (MPI-SWS)
- Ilya Sergey (NUS)