Graduate school experience in a systems group Jinyang Li assistant professor New York University

About me A graduate student at MIT ( ) –Wireless networks –Distributed search engines –Peer to peer routing, storage A postdoc at Berkeley ( ) –Wireless MAC protocols Advising my own graduate students since 2006 –Peer to peer storage, distributed file system, mesh networks

Stay active Get your hands dirty –Reading papers only gets you so far –Implement your system; a throw-away simulator/prototype

Build real systems (?) How real do you have to make your systems? effort reality simulator research prototype Many real usersEat-your-own dog-food

Be independent Graduate school is for thinkers –Not a code monkey –Be able to question your advisor Talk to others about your idea

Be optimistic Paper rejection is not the end of the world –There’s always another conference –You are not judged by the # of publications Still no thesis topic after n years! –Everybody graduates

Be persistent Do not abandon a project because –others think it’s hype/doomed/over-crowded –your co-workers also think so Make a project your own … he is a perfect academic, a true bulldog …

Graduate school in a nutshell A lot of work –What else do you expect? A lot of pain –Obsessing over hard/complex problems…. A lot of fun too