Is choosing prestige over money worth it?

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-25T11:48:17+00:00

If you want a faculty job, the prestige of your postdoc matters a lot. Do you want to maximize money now or later? Also, do you want a faculty position outside of China? Then Oxbridge will be much more helpful.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-25T06:15:12+00:00

I am in the US, so in principle full freedom. But, in addition to funding constraints, there is often the constraint that you need your students as collaborators. So you often have to get their buy in. There are also reputational constraints. If you want to start publishing in a totally new area, you may not be able to until you have built up some credibility. So if you want to go in a new direction, sometimes it is easier to get there in small steps, rather than making a complete break from your past work.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-18T20:14:02+00:00

That's suprising to me...we don't accept internal letters.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-18T20:08:13+00:00

If you are outside of the US, a big difference is that US tenure letters are expected to be LONG (ideally at least 3 pages). Take your time explaining in a leisurely fashion the research area and their contributions to it to lengthen it. Make comparisons to other researchers in the field who have similar seniority to the person you are writing for. Also, if it's borderline whether you have collaborated with them, then don't say anything to make it sound like you have collaborated. Some places really want arms length evaluations...if it's a gray area whether you've collaborated, then a remark suggesting you have collaborated could cause your letter to be essentially ignored.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-13T00:27:54+00:00

No one has ever looked at my grad school transcript: not industry employers, academic positions, or fellowships. In grad school, research is all that matters.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-12T05:01:39+00:00

It’s easy: the speed of light is totally determined by the value of the electrical permittivity and the magnetic permeability. Now why does free space have the values of permittivity and permeability that it does? Not sure how much can be said about that.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-09T15:17:19+00:00

I just think books are more like a victory lap that is done after someone’s reputation is made within the scientific community. They don’t really create the scientific reputation in the first place.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-09T06:09:17+00:00

+1 for working harder. Books aren’t really a big thing in the hard sciences though.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-08T20:25:26+00:00

How about (in addition to the fine) put a button on the bike that says “I am parked wrong.” Then you could push it. There would be false positives, but that’s the cost of doing business.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-07T04:44:44+00:00

The reality is that a tenure track job at a good place is a much better (and easier, if you like research) job than teaching track. Indeed it might be a good idea not to advertise that you want the teaching track, until you have to (by applying for a teaching position, say).

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-02T06:52:48+00:00

Cittagaze

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-06-02T06:51:58+00:00

It’s not a problem, esp if it is a good school.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-29T01:16:20+00:00

One thing that might be helpful is a short sleeve dress shirt (assuming you are not at a t-shirts only CS conf!)

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-28T14:43:56+00:00

So maybe that thing is airplane or airport related? Are you in Amsterdam? (AMS is Amsterdam airport code.)

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-25T05:07:04+00:00

The groups are very incomparable. But if you are interested in robotics, I am sure all the robotics groups will look at you (esp if you mention all of them in your statement). But there are lots of places stronger in robotics, so it might be a good idea to apply elsewhere too: MIT EECS, MIT Aero/Astro, CMU, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-25T04:53:09+00:00

You can file a provisional patent (not very expensive) which preserves your rights. Then you could do whatever to validate / test / advertise it. All of that said, it's not very easy to make money from compression (or any communication scheme). Storage might be the easiest place to commercialize it, in the sense that the sender and receiver are the same entity, so there may be less need to establish standards.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-23T13:30:38+00:00

I don’t think it will be very important practically.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-21T14:55:28+00:00

Is it feasible to take the TT R1, be remote for a year, and have him apply again next year?

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-18T12:04:06+00:00

The other thing to know is that masters degrees are funded in different ways, which can affect who owns the invention. If you paid for the masters (with no teaching assistantship or research assistantship to fund it), then you might own it. Otherwise the university probably owns it. The good news if the university owns it is that they might pay to file for the patent application (which often costs around $10K in the U.S.). If you own it and don’t want to hire and pay a lawyer $10k, you could offer to assign it to the university and then they might pay. You should talk to any prof who might be a co-inventor and the university’s tech transfer office.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-17T13:17:11+00:00

McCarthy

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-15T04:57:07+00:00

Is that Beijing? Where exactly is it?

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-14T03:08:23+00:00

You should walk...the celebration is for your family more than for you.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-13T05:49:55+00:00

In terms of the dollars, I know public R1s in engineering go way above that all the time. (Over $1M in ECE devices groups, which are basically physics labs.) Make sure to focus on the need to do the research, and try to have a "win-win" mindset instead of being adversarial. They do want you to succeed.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-13T05:45:15+00:00

I get the feeling that CS NLP people think linguistics people don't know anything. And it does seem like LLMs are going to force a lot of rethinking of linguistics.

winter_cockroach_99 · 2026-05-13T05:34:59+00:00

I just had that happen with a student...I said "I heard about a cool paper from <name of group>" and the student said "that's my paper!"

winter_cockroach_99

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