I gave a talk today on planning your stay abroad as a PhD student for an audience of mostly new PhD students at the ITU.
I basically tried to collect a set of questions and issues that I considered, or didn't consider before visiting Jean Krivine and Robin Milner at the École Polytechnique near Paris for seven months. Here are my slides, if you're interested.
Let me underline that I had a very nice stay abroad - not least thanks to Jean and Robin; but there were still a lot of practical things, that I wish I had thought of earlier on.
Some of you, my readers, have had experiences in living abroad as well. Do you have any good advice to PhD students that are going to plan their stay abroad?
5 comments:
Yes! Don't do it! Just say no!
Just kidding. My own stay abroad was the most interesting part of my PhD, perhaps only equaled in some respects by the first six months of my PhD, where everything was new and I a young idealistic person.
I went to visit Prof. Davide Sangiorgi in Bologna, Italy. A hot-shot within process calculi; leading expert on pi-calculus. I had a wonderful stay there, got a paper with Davide and enjoyed the city with my wife and small child.
Importantly, a had agreed with him in advance what would be our relationship; co-researchers, but with him as the senior one. That means: He provides overall ideas, I do the proofs, we sanity-check them together, I write the paper, he makes it better.
Troels has drawn out many important questions in his slides. I hope he covered the answers in his talk.
Thanks for sharing some of your experience, Ebbe.
I should perhaps fill in some details, that I mentioned at the talk. I also ended up having the opportunity to work in co-researcher kind-of relationship with Robin and Jean. Robin was on a sabbatical at the time, and Jean did a post. doc. with Robin. Which highlights some points that I mentioned at the talk: Do make sure that there are several persons that you can interact with, and that they are enthusiastic about your visit and have time for you.
You should not feel that you have to come begging for a visit - you bring your expertise and mind to the table as well. (And as danish PhD fellow, you even come well-equipped with funding as well.)
I think Troels' slides are an important piece of work - In fact, I think it should be written up as a note available from the Study Board's home page.
I also had an extremely valueable stay at Queen Mary in London, visiting not only Peter O'Hearn but all of the East London Massive, but I didn't feel very well prepared once I got over there. There is one important point I'd like to stress. It is extremely important that you know for sure that the guy you are visiting is actually interested in your research and will spend time on it. Make sure that the guy you are visiting is not too busy and that the way he/she works leaves time to be interested in the foreigner that is coming over. I think that is more important than visiting a hot-shot guy, if that one doesn't have the time and energy to work with you.
Oh, and do consider taking an internship at MSR, if you can get the chance. That doesn't have to be part of your foreign stay (I am sure the study board will grant you the 12 weeks leave it takes, if you want to do it that way). They help you organize a lot of the logistic stuff (a place to stay, a bank, even cycle hire, and they pay well, too). That could give you a bit of a feel of what it is like to be away from Copenhagen, or whereever you are. If you like it, you can keep it as leave, and if not (and I know people who hated being abroad), it's not so far away from home, and you might be able to tweak the study board into letting you use it as half of your stay-away.
Thanks Noah - also for sharing some valuable experience.
I sincerely agree to your point about not necessarily visiting a hot-shot researcher. Visit the person, or preferable persons, that have the time, inclination, and interest in you and your field. Sometimes less senior researchers tend to be more hungry - and unburdened with administrative tasks.
And wrt. MSR (Microsoft Research) I haven't tried that myself, but I visited Luca Cardelli at MSR Cambridge this spring, and they do seem to have a wonderful amount of time and money on their hands;-) (Great coffee!)
Noah, you're right. It is paramount that you synchronise expectations with the host before making the agreement to go there. Preferably the host should be interested in your research and agree to spend time doing research with you, or at least agree to supervise you properly. Picking a hot-shot for a host is often risky as that person will likely be extremely busy. However, if you can agree on expectations, e.g. wrt. time, then you should be okay, as was I.
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