Comedy Lab
How a research group in EECS became stand-up comedians in 10 weeks
One year ago, my advisor, Prof. Charles Leiserson in CSAIL, arranged for our research group to take a stand-up comedy class with Dana Jay Bein, a local comedian with Improv Boston. Charles sold it to us as an opportunity to work on our communication skills while participating in a fun activity as a group. Nobody […]
Policy Debate vs. Research
Applying high school debate skills to PhD research
Unlike many of my fellow graduate students in computer science who have been doing programming and math competitions since high school (or potentially earlier), I spent six years in middle and high school in policy debate. This usually meant I was traveling around the country almost every weekend to argue about the government and international […]
Teaching as a Graduate Student
My experience as a TA and advice for future TA's
When I signed up to be a teaching assistant for MIT’s performance engineering course (6.172) in Fall 2017, multiple people warned me about how much work it would be. Their advice made me nervous about taking on the responsibility, but I had TA’d three times as an undergrad, so I thought I was a veteran. […]
