As I understand the space problems, the College is becoming very well-known, both nationally and internationally, and computer science is becoming a very popular discipline. Both of these factors have caused our enrollment to increase significantly. Because of this, the College has to hire more and more faculty, and recruit proportional numbers of graduate students. The hard constraint, that of physical space for this increasing population is something that Jessica and Dean Freeman have been trying to manage and lobby for the best that they can. As I understand the situation, the problem of gaining more space is outside of the control of the College. The obstacles that we're facing are at the Institute, Board of Regents, and State level. Because of the growth of the undergraduate population, these issues of recruiting and hiring are, to a certain extent, also outside of the College's control. We have more students to teach - therefore the Institute wants us to have more faculty (never mind the shortsighted problems of insufficient classroom space). Add to this the issues and politics required to bring in quality faculty, who want promising lab space, offices, and so on, and you have the
There's nothing that the graduate student population can do to change the issue of space and being reallocated to multiple buildings. The best we can do is make sure that students are represented on the various space and building planning committees to ensure that our space requirements are met. Jessica has assured us that she would attempt to keeps us informed about the upcoming decisions so we can make preparations one way or another. There are some issues of space allocation that are being discussed that could impact many people but I will leave it to her to tell us in a timely fashion. The energies of the graduate student population should instead be concerned with the issues of community.
Why should we be concerned with issues of community? We are at the size right now where it's very difficult, if not impossible, to have a good connection with all the faculty and graduate students. Most organizations tend to begin by being small and intimate where it was possible for people to foster good working relationships and friendships because of physical proximity. As they become more successful, they tend to grow larger and more impersonal, not by design or desire but by circumstance. In the worst case, they become so large that the individual can become lost in the resulting, huge, amorphous entity, populated by small factions that isolate themselves in their function or compete with each other for resources. In the best case, the large organization functions as a series of locally productive and efficient modules that interact with each other when required and desired. The benefit of the small organization model is an increased opportunity for cross-disciplinary interaction. The benefit of the large, tightly modularized model is diversity and depth of research within areas with some potential for interdisciplinary interaction. The downside of the large model is that it takes more work to retain cohesion. The dangers of the large, worst-case model should be very clear. It is a very chaotic model where a student would not want to study or live.
The graduate students must *choose*, at this point in time, during this critical period, the kind of organization that they want to have. We can't control the growth or the space. We can decide what kind of *community* we want to have and *how* we will make that happen by working with faculty and by working with each other. But *not choosing*, because of lack of interest, means that we are hoping that we will be left alone and or that things will work out in the end or that someone else is working on the problem. Most of you know that you can't do good research or program good applications by hoping things will work out - these things work because you had a plan and a design. Very simply, we can choose to have a community and design a community that we want, even if that choice is to have no community and every graduate student works in isolation with their working group and advisor until they finish and leave.
What do I mean by community? We discussed many ideas on Thursday. Some of the ideas included defining a community as a group of people brought together by shared interests, shared experiences, physical proximity, opportunistic interaction, and a common purpose. We discussed different levels of community. There's the intellectual/academic level where people are drawn together by research or teaching problems and issues. There's the social level where people interact through shared hobbies and interests. There's no question that these two levels exist throughout the College but are becoming increasingly specialized in implementation.
What kinds of interactions do you have within a community? There are planned and structured interactions, such as classes, talks, lectures, meetings, picnics, intramural games, and Happy Hour. There are serendipitous interactions - chatting with someone by the printer, in a lab, or in a hallway. What the graduate students were saying Thursday's meeting is that they were feeling that there aren't enough global, structured interactions that involved the whole College intellectually and that there should be more interactions that involve the whole College socially. They also lamented the fact that there are fewer opportunities for the chance interactions - because of the multiple buildings, because students are being isolated to their area labs, and because no one seems to be interested in them. Others said that it didn't really matter because things were fine in their working groups and labs - that they were getting enough interaction and didn't really have the time or energy to meet more people.
So what do we gain from being part of the community? At this point, some of you may be saying that you're not interested in meeting other people, that you have your desk and workstation and your research and don't need anything else. Why is this increasing isolation a problem? Pragmatically speaking, there is a purpose to being an active member in the academic community. If there wasn't, we wouldn't need a College.
Professionally, these people that you encounter will become your peers, colleagues, and contacts in a field that will have increasing significance and importance as society becomes increasingly intertwined and interdependent on computers. You will see them at conferences and on national committees, work with them to get grants, help or be helped by them to get academic and industry jobs, recommend students and faculty to one another, and collaborate with them on research. By choosing to stay in your office and not getting involved, save by publishing papers and going to conferences, you are denying yourself this network. These kinds of connections are made through a combination of structured and unstructured interactions, over a long period of time. Just-in-time networking is difficult, superficial, and can be very dangerous.
What do you lose intellectually by isolating yourself? No one succeeds by themselves. An intellectual community affords you a wide variety of extremely competent, smart, and knowledgeable people to talk to about your research problems or about their research problems. You gain insights simply by trying to explain your ideas to another person outside your area. You may learn new ways of thinking about your problem because someone from another discipline can offer you a different approach to tackling it. Ever have someone else debug a program for you? Other people from outside your knowledge but understanding your intent, will be able to see things that you can't because you're too close to your thought processes. If you examine the research performed in older, mature disciplines, you will tend to see at least three types of work: Brilliant, genius-level work that only 2-3 people in the world are capable of and extend the field in a significant manner, Work that concerns local optimizations or incremental discoveries in established phenomenon, and Work that puts the knowledge of that field in context or in application, often in conjunction with another discipline. The first type is vital. The second type is necessary. I believe that in order for a discipline to be alive and fresh, that the third type has to be encouraged. The challenging problems will be increasingly multi-disciplinary because that is the nature of the world. There are many examples of research that benefited from the infusion of ideas from another discipline that studied similar problems. I believe that we all benefit from more, not less knowledge, about the work being done in other computing areas.
Lastly, you save yourself a lot of time and grief with a little bit of information and friendly advice. The older students have a lot of knowledge about the workings of the college, passing qualifiers, choosing advisors, what to do when you get stuck on research, where the best bars are, who the good mechanics are, and so on. Most of us older students will take the time to answer questions from the newer students because we were helped the same way when we were going through the ranks. In turn, we expect and hope that those students will help the newer ones.
This brings up the first of a several points that I would like to make in closing this essay - that of your responsibility to your community. Whether we decide to limit community to labs and working groups or to try and build a College-level community, each and every one of you have a *responsibility* to contribute!! The life that you have as a graduate student (and from experience, I know that we are doing rather well compared to other departments), the caliber of the faculty, the quality of the equipment, and the numerous other benefits that you experience but may not realize, are partly the result of the hard work of *generations* of students that have come before you. You have a responsibility, not just to yourselves but to those who will come after you, to contribute in a tangible and productive way to your community. Locally, within your building, floor, research area, or lab, this means representing your group in College-wide activities (such as faculty or PhD student recruiting), participating in meetings in your area, giving feedback and suggestions for improvement, organizing social events, but in all cases - being Active!! Globally, there are a small number of students who have been participating on college-wide and campus-wide committees, putting on Grad Teas, and working hard to make the College a better place to work and live. There is plenty of room for more students to serve on these committees, to put on Grad Teas, and to help with College-level events and projects. Please ask yourself "What are my responsibilities to my community?" and act accordingly.
Secondly, I've made the best attempt that I could to articulate the issues of community but I have not articulated what I believe our community should be. I would like the College of Computing to be a productive, intellectual community that creates and encourages interactions within the individual research areas but also across them. I would like the community of students to be one that has many opportunities for both intellectual and social interaction, structured and unstructured and is composed of those who are actively interested in interacting with each other. I would like a community of faculty and students that actively works, creates, and plays together. I know this sounds very idealistic and more than a little vague, but aren't dreams where great things begin?
Lastly, and most importantly. *You* have to decide what you want for yourself and what you think is best for the College! At the meeting, one of the graduate students pointed out that the decisions and discussions were primarily being led by people who thought the same. Only about 25+ students bothered to show up to this discussion. We decided we need more information.
* If you believe strongly
about the issues that I've set down here, one way
or another, take up the debate on the git.cc.students
newsgroup!!
* Mail the Graduate Liaison,
Mike Cramer (mjc@cc) with your opinion if you
don't want to discuss this on a public venue so that
he can get a better idea of where everyone stands.
* Talk to other graduate
students in your area or to the older or newer ones.
Get a range of perspectives before you form an opinion.
If we, as a student body are going to be apathetic and just let things happen, then we can't complain when we suffer for it. If we, as a student body, decide that these issues are *irrelevant* then those of us who have been working contrary to the majority, can get on with our lives, finish our research, and go. I hope that we, as a student body, will take the responsible course of action and begin working to design a community that we believe to be the most beneficial for ourselves and for the College, in the next few weeks, take up this discussion. In November, we should have a larger, more representative meeting to discuss what we want so that we can decide how we want to act.
Let me close on one final note. There is a benefit to community
that many of us may understand implicitly if not explicitly:
We benefit simply by having connections and bridges to
other people.
This is part of being alive and being human. When all is said and done, at the end of your time, how will you measure the quality of your life? What we do in our discipline as computer scientists, ultimately, is to build and study tools that improve the quality of life, whether by extending our knowledge, our capabilities, our ability to communicate, or our ability to express ourselves imaginatively. Our research is our contribution to human civilization. Being alive and belonging to a society means that we should be concerned with how we are connected to other people because those connections are what will define us as human beings. I took a couple hours the other night and wandered through many of the web pages belonging to numerous graduate students. I saw that in addition to many brilliant thinkers that we have many creative and talented writers, poets, athletes, musicians, artists, and explorers. We have a large diversity of backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, and knowledge - both within the field and without. All of these people are passionate about the things that they do and have knowledge that they took years to acquire. I consider myself to be very fortunate to be around and working with these people. It is my deep regret that my time and energy does not allow me to get to know most of you. It is my hope that the community that we choose to develop will help us to overcome the difficulties that we will face as we grow in population and geographical isolation. It is my hope that the community that we choose to develop will make it easier for us to learn from one another.
