Let’s talk more about school because it’s so fun. A big part of a grad student’s career is publishing papers. Publishing papers is how you pee around your little patch of the research world where you’re doing your work. If you don’t pee, then someone else is going to pee in your spot, and well you won’t get recognition for the hard work you’ve put in.

Publishing papers isn’t instant. You need to submit your papers to conferences, which are then peer reviewed, and are only published if there is some novel contribution. I think that publishing papers is a game that those in academia play. A lot of the time, the work people are publishing is not significantly different than previous papers they’ve published, or maybe their (new) work isn’t even novel; but through obfuscation and some fancy wording they may have been able to publish their paper. It’s also one measure of how successful you are as a grad student.

Anyways, generally a PhD student publishes more papers because they have a longer time to work on stuff, but that’s not to say that Masters students don’t. Maybe you’re working on a project with a PhD and you get your name on the paper, or maybe you came up with some original work yourself. The work I was doing wasn’t really conducive for publishing, and so i haven’t published; until now that is. Late in December, our group hammered out a paper which we submitted to Ubisafe, and we found out this week that it was accepted.

So yay for me, in the future you maybe able to stalk me on Google Scholar.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: uwaterloo.ca