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Graduate Career Growth

Effective Fall 2007

As a graduate student, you must decide how you most want to use your degree. Some students are mostly interested in teaching, while other are interested in a career in software development, while still others are interested in a career of pure research. Many students have a combination of these in mind. While pursuing your higher degree, you should keep those areas in focus and pursue opportunities that enhance your abilities in the areas that are important to you.

Teaching

If you want to use your degree to pursue a teaching career, you will need to accumulate significant teaching experience while at the UO. The first step is to inform the Graduate Coordinator that you would like GTF assignments that reflect a significant classroom role beyond just grading assignments.

Summer Session Classes

Each year, graduate students can propose and teach CIS courses for the summer session. CIS Summer Session teaching positions are available to GTFs and other qualified graduate students. The teaching load is one course.

Summer GTFs are not teaching assistants, and have sole responsibility for planning and delivering a course (within departmental guidelines).

If you are considering an academic career, summer teaching is an excellent way to acquire classroom experience. It's possible to offer a course related to your research, if there's an undergraduate audience for it.

For information, please contact Michael Hennessy, CIS Summer Session Director.

Software Development

Careers in software development can be very lucrative with an advanced degree, however, most employers look for education in other areas as well. The Computational Science Institute [insert link and text here].

Programming Competition

Each year the department participates in the International Collegiate Programming Contest. This contest, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is a competition between teams of student programmers to see which team can solve the most programming problems in a short amount of time. Participating on a team (especially a winning team) is a nice addition to a resume or graduate school application.

A number of organizations, such as Google or TopCoder, periodically hold programming contests open to graduate students. The prizes vary, but winning generally shows an ability to perform under pressure.

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Open Source Projects

Work on open source projects show a future employer that you are capable of teamwork and goal attainment. Many open source projects exist that need major contributors. Included in the many web sites that support open source development are freshmeat, SourceForge, Open Source Directory and many others.

Summer Internships

Internships provide students with invaluable practical work experience and usually offer a combination of credit and/or pay. There are usually a limited number of year-round local opportunities as well as many summer internships involving travel.

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Research

Establishing a career in research involves many social as well as academic skills. Since most research is collaborative, you should start by joining a lab in the department. If you have specific interests that fall outside any of the established labs, find a professor who shares your interest and work together. Establishing a name in any field of research means getting published, so you should work with as many groups as possible without sacrificing the quality of your research.

Attending Conferences

Academic conferences are a major vehicle to gain exposure to fellow researchers. Relationships built amoung your peers in the field can lead to many opportunites later in your career.

Professional Organizations

While it may seem trivial, membership and active participation in professional organizations suggest to potential employers that you are a serious scientist. The most common organizations are the ACM and IEEE.