Forty five Stanford students (myself included) have been given the opportunity to come back to campus this summer to participate in a 10-week program called CURIS. Its goal is to “encourage students to get involved in computer science research with faculty mentors early in their careers”. The professor in charge of the entire program (who happens to be an ex-body builder) told us that if we enjoyed the next ten weeks then we would really enjoy grad school. If the next ten weeks are a living hell, we should consider another line of work.
My particular project will be part of the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group. The faculty member in charge of this group (and my advisor) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics, Chris Manning. What exactly will I be doing? In a nutshell: I will be using statistical natural language processing and machine learning to do sentiment classification of stock news articles. In a smaller nutshell: Predicting stock prices based on the news.
Why did I decide to do CURIS this summer? Well, research and “real work” are different in many ways. I won't go into the details, but from experience I can say that I really love doing research. Given a choice between:
(1) debugging semiconductor failures using C and an oscilloscope
(2) doing experiments to design an algorithm that produces state-of-the-art technology
I would easily choose (2)— not because I dislike oscilloscopes but because the nature of research is very different. The freedom to set your own priorities and goals is very liberating. I am not studying computer science because I want to spend the rest of my life sitting in a cubicle trying to further the profits of some company I don't care about— I am studying computer science because I love computer science.
Hopefully this summer I will have the opportunity to develop that love and decide whether or not academia is right for me.
Good luck with your project. It will be interesting to read descriptions of what you do.
Oscilloscopes pwn you.
“I am not studying computer science because I want to spend the rest of my life sitting in a cubicle trying to further the profits of some company I don't care about…”
Is this the direction my life is headed? Oh woe is me…
I could take Dawson.
I would love to hear more about the details of your research. Just keep in mind that you are often going to be serving “someone's profits”, even in doing something you enjoy. Hopefully, your research will be fulfilling a noble agenda…I am not quite sure if analyzing stocks would be advantageous to society, but it seems fun. Good luck!
Not all corporate work is debugging chips with oscilloscopes, but I think you make an interesting point. The kind of freedom you have in academia is rarely found in corporate environments.
I'm curious what you actually like about CS research— and whether you would find that in corporate research or a startup. At least from my experience, I found more freedom in corporate research, and more resources at my disposal. Academics spend a lot of time justifying their research, and often don't have the resources to turn a great idea into a great product. Corporate researchers and people who work are start-ups often do.
It sounds like you're really into academia, and that's great, but you might want to consider one of those other options, because they may give you what you want without some of the problems that plague academia.