When you apply ...

When you apply for a position, you have to present yourself. The documents you send for your application are your chance to provide a glimpse of who you are and what you stand for.

I recently had the opportunity to review more than a dozen applications for a PhD position. Being on the other side of the fence was a revealing experience. It would be great if everyone that applies was once in the position to judge such applications. Here are some of the things I learnt:

• Be specific. Of course, being generic is easier, but it's just not helpful. Take this example:

  Dear esteemed Sir,
  I look to go for doctoral studies to refine my knowledge and skills in my areas of interest ...

  If you know the name of the person to whom your application is to be sent, address it directly. If you do not know it, find it out. And if you cannot name the area, you will have a hard time convincing anybody of your interest.

• Let them decide. Don't say: I am fit because you advertised that XYZ is a requirement and I have more than 5 years experience in this domain.

  They are the one judging, and you telling them that they should choose you won't make them forget that they are the ones who take the decision. In fact, it is annoying to be told what to think, and the reaction tends to be to reject the suggestion. Instead of trying to force the conclusion that you are the fittest person for the job, just pinpoint what you think is important and relevant from your past, and let them decide.

• Have a clear structure. It should not cost them anything to read your application. If possible it should produce pleasure. A clear graphical design is a must, but a funky one is almost always a minus.
• Have a webpage. If you captured their interest, they will want to know more. This webpage is your second chance to make a first impression.
• Check the spelling and the grammar. And double check.
• Strive to tell a story. Enumerate facts from your past that you think are relevant for the position, but if possible put them in a coherent story. If you manage, you increase the chance of being remembered.

  For example, don't just say: I worked there in that domain. Tell them why did you choose to go there, and why that domain. Give them a hint of the way you think.

• Get feedback. An application is a succinct presentation of what you are and what you stand for. Being succinct is never easy, and it is at odds with being exhaustive. Getting feedback from other people is mandatory to ensure a reasonable balance between brevity and enough relevant details.

Presenting with text - 20000 views later

The "presenting with text" slideshow attracted more than 20000 views on slideshare.net over the past 10 months.

I must admit I did not expect this much attention to be allocated to a few words thrown in almost random order on black slides. Ok, a couple of these were indeed colored, but still.

The only embarrassing thing is the misspelling of "break" as "brake". My only hope is that people stopped watching the dull text and did not get as far as slide 24 to see it. On the other hand, I now learnt my lesson: splelcheck and checks the grammar.

In any case, thanks for watching.

The warfare of PhD defense

Over the past couple of years I had the chance to follow closely the process through which PhD works are designed and written, and I noticed a couple of patterns that are independent of the domain.

To get a PhD, you have to pass an exam. Actually it is not just an exam, it is a defense. A thesis defense. That is, the whole point of the exam is for the candidate to successfully defend his thesis.

Contrary to popular belief, a thesis is not a document, it is one statement. There indeed is an accompanying document, but its job is to provide a detailed discourse and evidence for why the thesis statement is important and correct.

You can think of a thesis as a demarcation of a territory and the rest of the discourse as a defense mechanism. A broad thesis defines a broad territory, while a concise one defines a narrow territory. At first sight, you might be tempted to cover as much territory as possible, but the broader yours is, the more difficult it is to defend. A good general chooses the terrain that matches his army.

While the size of the territory is an issue, the value of a territory is only rarely given by its dimensions. Most of the time, the value comes from what lies in that territory. The territory needs to be important enough so that people desire to attack it. After all, there is no defense without an attack, or at least the possibility of an attack. Thus, the first requirement for a thesis is to address a problem that is considered relevant.

The second requirement is for the thesis to be clear enough so that it leaves no room for interpretation. My template for a thesis looks like this:

To solve this we need to do that

This is probably not the only way you can write one, but if you do it along these lines, you make clear what the problem is (this), what the solution is (that), and most of all you leave no doubt that you in fact stand for something.

Once you have an important and clearly delimited territory, your defense must go in concert with it. If the defense line can be avoided, it is of no use to have deep trenches. The Marginot line was the greatest defense system ever created, but it was rendered irrelevant given that the battle was not carried out there. Thus, you should make sure there are no cracks in your defense, and you should make sure your defense cannot be circumvented.

Many times the design of the thesis and of the accompanying defense are tackled only during a final dedicated period of writing. This is not an optimal approach.

One thing that you should remember is that the PhD defense is not just a conglomerate of smaller pieces. It needs to be designed into a coherent piece. Like any design, the design of a PhD defense requires time to mature. Thus, it is best to start with it from the very beginning, rather than postpone it to the very end. Most probably you won't come up with the final thesis from the start, but the process of formulating the thesis, of finding cracks in the defense and of evolving both them as you go forward and learn more, is the one that will get you ready for the final defense.

While there are several similarities between PhD defense and warfare, there is at least one important difference: unlike in real wars, both the terrain and the defense are completely under your control. You are the one that defines the terms and it is your duty to make sure the battle will be carried out where and how it best suites you.

To pause or not to pause

Talking fast without pausing can cause anxiety, because if you do not allow the audience to take a break it will feel overwhelmed with information. In a sense, it is like drinking water without breathing. It can be cool for a short while, but even if you are really thirsty, you will find that the need for air is more compelling than the need for water. That is why, pouring water into someone's throat is such an effective torturing technique.

Pause is the remedy. Nevertheless, there are cases when the lack of pause can be an effective tool. Not to torture, but to communicate. Willie Smits makes a brilliant use of this technique in his TED talk. I encourage you to spend 20 minutes to watch it.

He starts slowly, apparently talking about an innocent encounter with an orangutan. He gets the audience to applaud his effort to salvage this and other 1000 orangutans, but he takes everyone by surprise with:

No, no, wrong! It's horrible! It's a proof of our failure to save them in the wild!
Willie Smits

He makes a swift transition to the larger problem of deforestation and points to the ecological, economical and human tragedy behind it. He then switches gears, and pours down a tone of details of how they reversed the tide by re-growing a huge rainforest that now serves as a habitat not only for orangutans, but for a whole range of other species, while also being economically beneficial for the people.

We learn how he picked the worst place he could think of so that no one will have an excuse in saying that it is not possible. We learn how they planned the work by splitting it into smaller pieces, by measuring and by involving the local inhabitants. He then goes down into small scale details like how they approached the agroforestry not by the text book, which says to by growing crops between trees to reduce the competition between trees and to help fertilizing them, but by first tackling fire by planting sugar palms.

And he goes on and on. No pause until the very end, just tons and tons of details of the various facets of the problem and the afferent solutions. It's basically impossible to remember all of them, but that is not the goal. The whole point of these details is to reveal the scale of complexity of the problem at hand. The lack of pause is used to build the case for the one message summarized in just one word: integration.

I just love this talk and the amazing work it tells.

Is it going to rain today?

Is it going to rain today? It's great to know the answer to this question when deciding how to dress for the day.

When I was still living in Timisoara, Romania, I used to use the Yesterday's Weather heuristic: today's weather is going to be similar to yesterday's weather. And it worked about 70% of the time. Not bad for a heuristic.

When I came to Berne, Switzerland I continued to use this heuristic for a while, but my prediction rate dropped dramatically. Why? Because the weather in Berne just does not want to comply with this heuristic.

One possibility to improve the situation would have been to complain to some higher authority to regulate better the Berne weather so that I can go on with my nice little system. The other solution was to understand that heuristics are just approximations of our understanding of a particular situation or system.

In the case of my heuristic, it took me a while to understand that I should not predict "weather", but "weather in Timisoara", and "weather in Berne". In other words, the location has a significant influence on the weather, and this influence should be explicitly taken into account. For that matter, there are many other factors that need to be taken into account, but location provides a reasonably good example for the discussion here.

It is not because a heuristic worked in one situation, that it is directly applicable to others. This idea stayed at the basis of my very first scientific paper which was about how we should first check our heuristic against the historical data of a system, and to apply it to the current situation only if it proved effective in the past.

As a consequence, I am not using that heuristic when in Berne (except perhaps in summer when the rain is not that cold).

Is it going to rain today in Berne? Maybe, according to goingtorain.com. goingtorain.com is slightly different than other weather prediction sites. Instead of saying "there are 60% chances of precipitation" they say "maybe". And in big letters.

I do not know what heuristics they use, but I do like their presentation. It reflects honesty. They can certainly not go wrong with a "maybe", but they are not afraid of saying that they just don't know and that the responsibility is yours. However, when they do know something they say "yes" or "no". No matter the answer, they put it in big letters. That is, they stand behind their heuristic and they recognize that it is not a perfect one.

Good heuristics are hard to find, and when we find them they improve decision making. The only important thing to remember is that no matter how good, heuristics are not laws. They are still just approximations.