About the young researchers forum (4)

Forth and last post about the PODC/DISC young researchers forum. Some lessons from the event.

General feedback

We got very good feedback from the participants, which was very nice!

There were some critics about the date: Friday is not good for people in Israel, and it was too close to PODC. Because we organized the event too late, we did not have much choice, but for next editions we’ll try to do better. It is unclear what is the best time of the year for the forum, avoiding deadlines and conferences.

Personally, I also learned an important lesson: choosing CET time for an event in June is stupid. I had in mind that CET was the time zone of France, Germany and other countries in Europe, so it looked reasonable; but because of daylight saving time, this is not the case in summer (these countries use CEST in summer, Central Europe Summer Time). CET ended up coinciding with the time zone of Billy in the UK, so it was not completely wrong, but since the time zones were crucial for the event, we add to highlight this many times in the emails, which was a bit painful.

About the junior-senior meetings

We also asked the seniors who participated in junior-senior meetings for feedback.

In general, they said that 30 minutes was too short, especially when they had 4 and 5 juniors, and that 45 to 60 minutes would be better. To break the ice they asked everybody to present themselves and/or told some personal stories. One of the seniors had asked the juniors to prepare a slide with one unexpected/unusual thing about themselves, which is also a good way to create a friendly atmosphere and to remember people.

Here is a list of questions that were asked by the juniors:

• What mistakes have you done during your PhD?
• How to find and work with a mentor?
• How to get a postdoc?
• How to adapt to a new topic during a postdoc (since it is shorter than a PhD)?
• How to get papers accepted?
• How to get a 50-page paper in 12 pages?
• How do theory result apply in practice?