ICSE Day 2: Gail Murphy Edition
Today ended a bit earlier, mostly because I was too tired from an early start and generally just walking around and taking photos all day.
In the morning, I was whisked aside by an organizer who put me in charge of an impromptu photo booth for the distinguished paper award winners. I also seem to still be the only student volunteer photographer out of three that were supposed to show up, so it’s a bit concerning… I had wanted a day where I took 0 photos but it looks like that’s not likely happening.
Today, I attempted to do what everyone who went to a conference encouraged me to do, and talk to people. I had an interesting conversation with Emerson Murphy-Hill about what research is like in an industrial setting. From what he said, I get the sense that there’s a lot less “behind-the-scenes” administration that he needs to do. That makes sense, as an industrial researcher, you don’t really need to hire TAs, order textbooks, or create syllabi for any courses. He also mentioned something about the impact you have as an industrial researcher vs. an academic; you have more of an immediate effect on students as an academic who is also engaged in teaching, but you can operate at a much higher scale as an industrial researcher. Apparently getting 2000 developers to respond to a survey at Google is a piece of cake.
I also met up with Caroline today! A familiar face in the largely unfamiliar canvas of faces I’ve seen so far at the conference. I also finally met up with Thomas and Martin, members of the Software Engineering Reading Group at UW whom I’ve been seeing for the past two years. They are much taller in person.
Something jarring was the amount of “oh, you work with Gail Murphy” and “Oh, you’re Gail’s student!”-adjacent comments I got while speaking to folks. It seemed like every third person I met was either Gail’s postdoc, or connected to her in some way. It made me so weirded out that I stopped mentioning who I was advised by later on, but the conversation still somehow managed to steer itself back to the topic of supervisors.
We didn’t want to make the same mistake with the reception we made yesterday, so Sophie and a few other CMU-based student volunteers decided to lead us to Primanti Bros, which I have been led to believe to be a Pittsburgh institution. Honestly, it was just burgers made with sandwich bread and stuffed with fries, 5/10.
We went back to the reception for a bit, and then decided to end the night at The Warren Bar and Burrow. I had a weird lacto-fermented sour that was green. Its taste is best described as a cross between a traditional sour and a Mountain Dew… intriguing.
With all this, I still managed to squeeze in some work in preparation for my meeting with Gail tomorrow.