This blog post is a little bit hard for me since I am the first and only student of Prof. McGill and we do not belong to any lab yet. Our research area is in cyber security but very different from the other professors' research area in IST.
Finally, I decided to talk with three senior students, one in Prof. Liu's lab, one in Prof.Chu's lab and the other in Prof. Wang's lab. The first student is doing research in intrusion detection which is also in cyber securty field. The second student's partial research interest is in RFID security and the last is doing data mining but I think he has a lot of ideas about the future.
All of them have attended conferences including CIT, IEEE Workshop on Information Security, CCS and so forth.
All of them have published papers, most in conferences and one student was once asked by one conference to be the chair of one section of the conference(I was suprised).
I am very interested in how they see themselves academically. The first student think he likes his area and his area is more related to engineering so he wants to work in the industry after graduation. The second student wants to find a professor position in China, she prefers universities in Hongkong. And the last student also wants to find a professor position in China but he wants to work in a university near his hometown. We also talked a lot about the pros and cons of these choices. To be a professor in China is very different in USA, In China, professors are usually more related to engineering and they have more students. A phd from USA can obviously help us to find a professor position in one of the best universities in China. However, the academic environment, the graduate system especially for phd is not as good as USA.
For me, a first year phd student, I have not made up my mind yet. But maybe I'll work in the industry first as a consultant and I will come back to start my tenure if I get bored of industry. Is that possible?
The biggest difference between me and the other three students is that since I just finished by bachelar this year, my research interests are very broad and do not have a particular focus yet. However, the senior students all have narrowed down to a specific area and they know a lot about it.
Finally, I decided to talk with three senior students, one in Prof. Liu's lab, one in Prof.Chu's lab and the other in Prof. Wang's lab. The first student is doing research in intrusion detection which is also in cyber securty field. The second student's partial research interest is in RFID security and the last is doing data mining but I think he has a lot of ideas about the future.
All of them have attended conferences including CIT, IEEE Workshop on Information Security, CCS and so forth.
All of them have published papers, most in conferences and one student was once asked by one conference to be the chair of one section of the conference(I was suprised).
I am very interested in how they see themselves academically. The first student think he likes his area and his area is more related to engineering so he wants to work in the industry after graduation. The second student wants to find a professor position in China, she prefers universities in Hongkong. And the last student also wants to find a professor position in China but he wants to work in a university near his hometown. We also talked a lot about the pros and cons of these choices. To be a professor in China is very different in USA, In China, professors are usually more related to engineering and they have more students. A phd from USA can obviously help us to find a professor position in one of the best universities in China. However, the academic environment, the graduate system especially for phd is not as good as USA.
For me, a first year phd student, I have not made up my mind yet. But maybe I'll work in the industry first as a consultant and I will come back to start my tenure if I get bored of industry. Is that possible?
The biggest difference between me and the other three students is that since I just finished by bachelar this year, my research interests are very broad and do not have a particular focus yet. However, the senior students all have narrowed down to a specific area and they know a lot about it.
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