Breaking radio silence

Posted by Geoff Davis at 01AM on 10/14/07 | Categories: None | 1 comment

I've been pretty quiet these past few weeks - know that it's been for good reasons!

First, I've been head-down, in-the-trenches hacking away at some improvements to the graduate school guide. One limitation of the current site is that it is geared towards people who enroll full-time in doctoral programs. While that audience is important, the overwhelming majority of people who go to graduate school are in master's degree programs, and often (probably most of the time) they are looking for part-time programs near where they live and work. The new features are designed to help prospective master's students find appropriate programs.

Some good things are in store:

  • There is new information about master's degree programs, so there will be profiles of 22,000+ master's and doctoral programs rather than the current 6,000 or so doctoral programs.

  • I have expanded and refined the taxonomy of fields, so there will be new fields to choose from.

  • I have added a couple of new data sets - (1) more detailed information about degree recipients from IPEDS, and (2) information about grad student demographics and funding sources from the NSF's Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering.

Second, I have just moved from North Carolina to San Francisco because I will be starting a job at Google on Monday. The job is kind of complicated to describe; the short version is that I'll be a hybrid statistician/developer working with the user interface research team. I've spent a lot of time these past years asking interesting questions of large piles of data. Google has some incredibly rich data sets to mine, and I'll be digging away.

In other news, in early November, Peter and I will be attending a round table discussion on graduate student and postdoc issues hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I'll be putting together some materials in advance to discuss at the meeting, and I'm planning to hash them out here - I'm hoping for some good feedback.