
Unsolicited advice on CS independent work (2013) - lord_sudo
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/advice.html
======
pton_context
A bit of context for non-Princeton readers (commenting with a throwaway
because I don't want to dox myself).

You can take the CS major as either a Bachelor's or an Engineering degree.
Princeton requires all Bachelor's students to do two semesters of "independent
work" their junior year, plus a thesis senior years. Engineering students have
to do one semester of independent work, but they have to take additional
courses and have more specific requirements. (The CS BSE degree is currently
unique in not requiring a thesis.)

For many departments, junior independent work is a 20ish page research paper
you write over the course of the semester either as part of a seminar or one-
on-one with an advisor, so the CS independent work is intended to be roughly
equivalent in terms of rigor. It's my understanding that most CS students work
on a significant piece of software with a writeup at the end of the
semester—often (but not always) in a semester on a single topic (eg computer
vision, digital audio, etc) junior fall, and one-on-one with an advisor (or in
a lab) junior spring. BSE students will often do their one semester of
independent work senior year, in either form.

It's often pretty daunting staring at these requirements—and a lot of the onus
is on you, the student, to figure out what you want to do and initiate it—so
this advice seems to me to be aimed at students starting to plan their
independent work.

Don't take this as gospel—I'm actually not a CS major, somewhat ironically,
though I have many friends who are. Just hope this helps to contextualize
Kernighan's advice.

~~~
heavenlyblue
20-page paper is what you would need to write up at University of Leeds, UK;
so I am not sure what daunting here means, given the fact that you at one of
the most prestigious universities of the world?

~~~
johnmoberg
"daunting: making you feel slightly frightened or worried about your ability
to achieve something"

Do you think that students at prestigious universities are somehow immune to
feelings like this? Pursuing your first independent project, especially with
high standards, can be daunting for anyone.

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redis_mlc
In case you're not aware, Brian Kernighan worked with Dennis Ritchie and Ken
Thompson at Bell Labs. Brian wrote a lot of the Unix text processing
utilities, and is the "k" in awk.

"In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix", a pun on the name
"Multics."

His family is from Canada. I had the opportunity to attend a small lecture at
U. of Waterloo on "Little Languages" when he was in town in the mid 80's, with
about 10 other students. One of my biggest influences.

Some context on the article link. There was a time when CS was a novel area of
research. A lot of the experimentation into OS theory was made obsolete by
Linux, since you could just tweak an Open Source kernel instead of doing a
PhD-length project in schedulers, etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan)

~~~
KMag
Back at Google in NYC, my manager and I had desks near Peter Weinberger, and
on the other side of us, way down a hallway was Brian Kernighan's (part-time)
desk.

My manager was complaining about awk within earshot of Peter, making
embarrassingly sloppy cheap-shot arguments, and rather loudly. I said to him
"You know awk stands for Aho (/me points out window), Weinberger (/me points
over at Peter) and Kernighan (/me points down toward Brian's desk), right?" My
manager kind of ducked his head and quickly dropped his volume.

I never interacted with Kernighan, but everyone said he was very friendly and
surprising humble. Weinberger was always very friendly when I interacted with
him in the micro-kitchen, but I never worked on a project with him.

~~~
redis_mlc
Yes, Brian seemed like a nice guy when I met him.

On a related topic, after AOL bought Netscape, many of the "refugees" went to
Yahoo. There was one little wing with most of the famous server and HTML
pioneers sitting next to each other, including Rob McCool and Laura LeMay.

FYI: awk is fine if you don't have perl installed, but perl is 10x faster, and
more amenable to modular programming.

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_hardwaregeek
Man I'd love to have a two semester course where I could work on a project and
get advice from _Brian Kernighan_. I hope all the Princeton CS students
understand how lucky they are

~~~
glitchc
Be careful what you wish for...

My point: His interests may not align with yours.

~~~
tasogare
That’s often the case in research. For my first 6-8 months in my new lab I
pretty much spend most of my mental energy finding how to combine my own
research interests while fitting in the lab (i.e. do something that my prof
would approve). It’s mostly solved now, in part by doing some side project
secretly, but the big take away is that politics is actually an important part
of how research is done in real life.

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jjice
As soon as I saw it was from princeton.edu, I was hoping it was Kernighan. I
was not disappointed.

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eatbitseveryday
This seems to be from 2013:

> Sat May 11 18:00:52 EDT 2013

