ftw!

¶ ASPLOS XI reception Posted 21 years, 2 months ago on October 10, 2004

So I'm attending my first ever honest-to-goodness academic international conference. Conveniently enough, it's being held in boston. The Association for Computing Machinery Eleventh International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.

Yeah, it's not my field either.

Today was the reception. Apparently, I'm told that my main objective in attending a conference is not so much to attend the talks and learn new things as it is to meet people, shmooze, and network. So I mostly ended up tagging along with Charlie cause he seemed like he actually knew some people there, and was better at butting in on totally random conversations. It was funny cause half the people we met were senior graduate students about to graduate who were attending the conference mostly to meet existing faculty who might be useful during their job search. I was talking to one of them from UW and was like, "dude, what are you talking to me for?" and he basically said the faculty are intimidating and I was like "word..."

Met Manish, a brand new professor at University of Colorado at Boulder. He confirmed what I expressed to stacy, which was that once you become a faculty member, it's like an impenetrable barrier is erected between you and the students. That tiny little title "Professor" is enough to prevent you from ever being on the same buddy level as the other students. He was like "I really want to just scream and say 'guys! it's not a big deal! five weeks ago I was standing where you are!'" Makes me wonder what it would've been like if I tried to hang out with a junior faculty the way I did with my other friends. "Hey Ugur, wanna go catch a movie?" I'll bet they get over it, though... will have to ask larry about this one.

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