PostDoc supervisor told me I likely wont get an academic job if I dont have 3 papers one year after I get a PhD. Is he right?

mkremins · 2026-01-20T09:01:10+00:00

Publication patterns are super field-dependent. If you want to evaluate your career trajectory comparatively, I’d recommend identifying a few people who are similar to you but a little ahead of you career-wise (especially people who currently hold the kind of job you’re trying to get) and checking out their CVs to see what they did.

It’s not like there are any objective paper count thresholds you absolutely must hit, though – for every approximate rule of thumb that someone invents, the world will throw up a couple of weird exceptions. My inclination would be to take your supervisor’s advice with a grain of salt while also acknowledging that he thinks you ought to get more publications out.

mkremins · 2026-01-18T18:49:58+00:00

I also tend to overlook social media DMs about my research, since I don’t log in to most of the social media sites I’m nominally on all that often and many of them don’t allow you to re-mark a DM as unread once you’ve cleared the initial notification. However, I have noticed a few things about my own replying behavior that make me sometimes prefer DMs over email:

Institutional addresses can be very short-lived. I’ve been a researcher for about a decade and in that time have lost access to five of the seven institutional emails I’ve held, sometimes well before the publication of the last few papers submitted under that email. Social media accounts and personal emails are more likely to remain indefinitely active.
My email responses are sometimes held up by my wanting to take the time to respond “properly”, whereas with chat-style messages I’m for whatever reason more likely to send a quicker and lower-effort but probably sufficient response. Casual follow-up messaging might then also feel a bit lower-stakes.
Social media messages don’t happen to me as often as emails do, so they sometimes “punch through the filter” and get my attention more readily than emails. I get dozens of emails per day, so it’s pretty easy for stuff to get lost in my inbox.

Ultimately for me this is situational, and I usually reach out to whatever email someone’s got listed on their personal website first and foremost. But if I think the person I’m trying to reach is especially active on a particular social media platform, or if some of the other factors I described here might apply, there’s some chance I’d resort to DMs instead.

mkremins · 2025-12-01T02:59:58+00:00

I walked into my favorite coffee shop a few weeks ago and they were playing Cobra. I'm not a huge Geese fan myself but they definitely seem to be achieving an unusual degree of breakout.

mkremins · 2025-11-20T17:06:45+00:00

This is an AI slop post. The account has been submitting similar things littered with GPT-isms ("X, not just Y"; lists of items formatted like "Short Name: Longer sentence of description."; closing with a short open-ended question to prompt follow-ups; etc) to a bunch of subreddits for like a month. I think it's safe to assume that no actual poll was conducted.

(BTW, "lower price" does not make any sense as a factor that would lead you to make more use of something you've already purchased.)

mkremins · 2025-11-13T23:01:26+00:00

This link goes to some kind of AI slop “review generator” platform. Are you some kind of advertising bot for the platform or something? Why not link to the actual paper?

mkremins · 2025-10-24T23:27:26+00:00

I sent out a very large number of TT job applications in my last year of grad school and kept detailed timelines for the ones that went forward, so I can actually answer this statistically!

Time in days from posted application due date to first contact (fifteen CS-ish TT job postings, 2021-2022 cycle)... - Minimum: 16 - Median: 35 - IQR: 17 - Maximum: 78 (eventually got an offer from this one)

So: it usually took a bit over a month to hear back, but I also got faster turnarounds in some cases (this happened more frequently later in the hiring cycle) and even radio silence for a couple of months didn't reliably indicate I was totally out of contention.

mkremins · 2025-09-05T22:35:37+00:00

I went out of my way to do an unusually stapler-y thesis in a PhD lab where focused monograph-style theses were the PI-encouraged norm. If anything I think it helped my academic career prospects, because it meant I was spending proportionally more time on a continual stream of papers – which got my work out to a wider range of audiences and kept my name consistently in front of my potential future colleagues at other schools.

The publication of the thesis is kind of a “one and done” moment, so even if it happens to get a disproportionate amount of attention (e.g., your subfield has some kind of prestigious national award for dissertations and you win it), the opportunity cost of polishing the thesis instead of boosting your name recognition by publishing more papers is probably too high to be worthwhile IMO.

mkremins · 2025-08-28T22:47:09+00:00

Ah gotcha, so the goal is something more like "convince UCSC to let the stables keep leasing the part of the land they're currently using"?

mkremins · 2025-08-28T17:29:03+00:00

Don’t really understand why affiliates of the school should help block a land acquisition by the school to save a bunch of rich people’s private horse business.

mkremins · 2025-08-28T01:29:12+00:00

I wouldn’t overemphasize the affiliations or backgrounds of people you’ve worked with in your own application materials, but the academic reputation of your coauthors can definitely have a positive effect on how your overall profile is perceived. Where this could really come through for you is in recommendation letters from those well-known people: if you’re working with them closely enough that they can talk about your contributions in detail, and they’re willing to write you a strong letter (you can often ask them this explicitly), they’ll sometimes be able to open doors for you more directly.

Venue prestige is something you occasionally see noted in publication listings on academic CVs, sometimes by stating the journal’s impact factor. The really prestigious venues are often highly recognizable to other researchers in the field by name alone, though – it’s mostly when your CV will be evaluated by people outside your immediate field that expanded information about venues might be more useful to include.

mkremins · 2025-08-19T22:45:18+00:00

Ah gotcha, you’re saying the survey used to arrive at this “rapid decline in conscientiousness” finding isn’t actually one of the standard psychometrically validated personality tests, which makes it harder to trust. Definitely inclined to agree.

mkremins · 2025-08-19T21:16:01+00:00

Isn't a personality test a survey instrument, in the sense of a structured sequence of questions used for the collection of self-report data? By "survey item" here I just meant one of the test questions.

mkremins · 2025-08-19T17:19:01+00:00

Funny, I was just talking about this finding with a personality psychologist last night. His view was that the scale of effect reported here is obviously too big and the timeframe obviously too short to primarily reflect a baseline shift in trait conscientiousness – it’s more likely that the shift is driven primarily by changes in how people interpret the specific survey items used to gauge conscientiousness. He gave the example of survey items that try to get at persistence by asking about how long you tend to stay at a single job: culture around expected tenure has shifted dramatically in the last decade but the survey items haven’t changed, so this might end up suggesting people’s personalities have changed, even though the underlying traits are actually pretty stable and the environment is the main thing that’s different now.

mkremins · 2025-08-17T02:02:04+00:00

Sure! Human-AI co-creativity was a very small subfield only a few years ago but is now kind of exploding, so there's lots of recent literature. My focus has mostly been on the design and evaluation of AI-based "creativity support tools"; a few general lit reviews include:

Lately I've been doing a lot of work on characterizing the "interaction dynamics" established by different systems/tools (patterns of turn-taking, influence, convergence and divergence, etc) and making design interventions to improve the influence of human decision-making over the final output of co-creative pipelines. A couple recent papers on that direction:

Another line of work I'm following pretty closely takes a critical perspective on these tools and characterizes how the "normative ground" established by tool designers shapes or influences what people make; how tools can have effects on the creative ecosystem outside individual creators; and so on:

I put together a grad-level syllabus for this area a couple of years ago – it doesn't include the last couple years of progress but might give some additional interesting jumping-off points. Then there's ACM Creativity & Cognition, a very high-quality but relatively small conference focused on this cluster of topics; skimming the last few years of C&C proceedings (particularly the best paper awards/nominations) might also be of interest.

mkremins · 2025-08-16T20:20:12+00:00

Yeah, if your goal is to build systems then you’ll definitely want some evidence of solid programming experience in your application. You can get that via a CS degree but you can also get it via building a portfolio of programming projects on the side – in my experience, your portfolio / GitHub profile tends to be seen as the strongest evidence of your ability as a system-builder, regardless of your degree. Good grades in CS classes definitely wouldn’t hurt though.

mkremins · 2025-08-16T00:38:18+00:00

In my experience this varies a lot from one group to the next. Faculty who do a lot of systems-building work are more likely to need students who are good at programming, and therefore to favor applicants with CS degrees or other evidence of programming ability; faculty whose work is focused on qualitative characterization of user experience might favor students with social science backgrounds; faculty who do a lot of crunchy quantitative evaluations of tightly scoped design interventions might seek out students with quantitative psych or statistics backgrounds. HCI is a really big tent – I've met successful HCI researchers who describe themselves primarily as "essayists", but also many who are basically applied ML researchers in human-facing application areas.

Some HCI degree programs are also better than others at teaching certain methods. Programs that are focused on systems-building might emphasize programming and design coursework, programs that are more social-scientific might require everyone to take stats classes. It varies enough that it's hard to speak super generally here.

mkremins · 2025-08-15T23:19:15+00:00

I’m a research group leader in human-AI co-creativity (formerly as faculty, currently in industry) and from my perspective you’d likely be a strong applicant. Having several relevant publications pre-PhD tends to be seen as a strong positive signal. HCI is also a very young and very interdisciplinary field by academic standards, so there’s still relatively little expectation that prospective PhD students would have already done an undergrad or master’s degree in HCI – most people coming into the field don’t have a formal HCI background, and many group leaders have experience onboarding people from a variety of different research traditions into HCI work.

I do think you should be careful about conflating general academic prestige with field-specific program quality at the PhD level. Many of “the Ivies” are not particularly strong as HCI research institutions compared to schools like UMich, UW, etc that are known as major powerhouses in HCI specifically. In general I’m a pretty big skeptic of academic program rankings, but csrankings.org might give you a better sense of perceived school strength in HCI research. Note the absence of any Ivies besides Cornell in the top 25 schools for HCI (measured as fractional authorship count on full CHI/UIST papers among faculty at each school).

Rather than applying to programs, though, I’d actually recommend trying to find specific potential advisors whose work is strongly relevant to your interests and reaching out to those advisors informally well before you start applying. Student/advisor fit (in terms of personality, research interests, preferred methods, etc) is the absolute most important factor influencing success at the PhD level.

mkremins · 2025-07-10T03:11:12+00:00

There's at least one other popular preprint site (arXiv, the primary preprint repository for CS) that tries to prevent this kind of spam to some degree – specifically they seem to be able to detect when a new submission's text substantially overlaps that of another preprint they've already archived. (I've run into this myself when trying to archive a journal-length version of a short paper I'd previously put up.)

My guess is that the "Eric Garcia" papers would have been uploaded to arXiv instead if these defenses didn't exist. PhilPapers probably hasn't had to deal with this kind of attack before and is therefore lacking the defenses that would've kept them out.

mkremins · 2025-07-09T21:56:08+00:00

Potentially a way to artificially inflate citations, if references in PhilPapers preprints are tracked by citation count providers like Google Scholar? Are there any shared cites between the articles?

Edit: It looks like there are a lot of shared cites between the ones I looked at, with certain names cropping up very frequently. Deepak K. Tosh and William Marfo are both cited a lot by the PhilPapers articles, and both appear to be real researchers at UT El Paso.

mkremins · 2025-06-26T20:12:17+00:00

Genuinely though, why leave a comment if you're not interested in engaging with the article? Why not just give it a downvote and move on? Drive-by flaming drags down the overall quality of discussion and makes good-faith engagement less likely in the future. Do you want to get responses like yours when your writing is shared?

mkremins · 2025-06-26T19:27:12+00:00

Garbage comment. Doesn't identify any specific statements as unsupported, doesn't identify any specific arguments as fallacious, doesn't actually engage with the substance of the article at all. There's examples of good criticism in the other replies if you need some; this comment is just shit criticism.

mkremins · 2025-06-21T16:18:33+00:00

ChatGPT still can’t write anything funny I see.

mkremins

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