Patrick Lam

Thoughts and travels of Patrick Lam

Advice for Waterloo SE/CS/CE students about grad school

I wrote this in an email to a Waterloo Software Engineering student, but it’s worthwhile to put on the Internet more broadly.

Let’s take a step back and talk about graduate school vs undergrad. For a PhD essentially all of the action is in your thesis and very little is your courses. Of course you’re not signing up for a PhD at the moment but instead a Master’s, so it’s not quite the same.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Friday, October 23, 2020

Good Talks

In my Static Analysis for Software Engineering graduate course, each student is expected to present 2 papers to the class; Software Engineering undergrads also give talks as part of their Capstone Design Project. Here are some recommendations on how to give a good paper presentation.

Avoid bullets. When appropriate, diagrams are way better than bullet points for explaining concepts. Just because PowerPoint (or clone) makes it easy to write bullet points doesn’t mean that you should use bullet points.

Go concrete, not abstract. In fact, if you can explain the main idea of a paper with an example, focus on the example first and then summarize the key ideas. (This works better with concepts, not experimental results.)

Be choosy. You don’t need to present the whole paper. Just present the most interesting ideas. There’s no need to be exhaustive. The paper contains everything, after all. You’re just going over the highlights.

Think about charts. Try to make charts that tell a story and choose the charting technology that best supports that. (See Edward Tufte’s books.)

Also check out the Lessig style of giving talks.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo; patrick.lam@uwaterloo.ca

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