Four months without blogs

As you've noticed, I haven't posted in a while.  I've also not been reading blogs.  My unread number of posts is now 462.  Clearly I'm not going to go back and read all 462 posts that I missed.  I will claim that this was an experiment to see what a (nearly) blog-free world is like.

I actually found that I missed both the reading and the writing, so now (especially that I've switch over to public transportation and so have about an hour to kill in transportation time) I'm going to go back to reading while being transported and blogging when I have time.

I figured I'd return to blogging by saying a bit about a recent experience.  Less than a month ago I had the honor of serving on Jurgen Van Gael's Ph.D. examination committee.  Jurgen did an excellent job and, as perhaps expected, passed.  But what I want to talk about is how the UK model (or at least the Cambridge model) is different from the US model.

In the UK, the examination is done by two faculty members, one internal (this was Stephen Clark) and one external (that was me).  It does not involve the advisor/supervisor, though this person can sit in the room without speaking :).  There is no public presentation and the process we followed was basically to go through the dissertation chapter-by-chapter, ask clarification questions, perhaps some things to get Jurgen to think on his toes, and so on.  This took about two hours.

Contrast this to the (prototypical) US model, where a committee consists of 5 people, perhaps one external (either external to CS or to the university, depending on how your institution sets it up), and includes the advisor.  The defense is typically a 45 minute public presentation followed by questions from the committee in a closed-room environment with the student.

Having been involved, now, in both types, I have to say they each have their pros and cons.  I think the lack of a public presentation in the UK model is a bit of a shame, though of course students could decide to do these anyway.  But it's nice to have something official for parents or spouses to come to if they'd like.  However, in the US, the public presentation, plus the larger committee, probably leads to situation that students often joke about that not even their committee reads their dissertation.  You can always fall back on the presentation, much like students skip class reading when they know that the lecture will cover it all.  When it was just me, Stephen and Jurgen, there's really no hiding in the background :).

I also like how in the UK model, you can skip over the easy stuff and really spend time talking with the student about the deep material.  I found myself much more impressed with how well Jurgen knows his stuff after the examination than before, and this is not a feeling I usually get with US students because their defense it typically quite high-level.  And after 45 minutes of a presentation, plus 15 minutes of audience questions, the last thing anyone wants to do is sit around for another two hours examining the details of the defense chapter-by-chapter.

Regarding the issue of having the advisor there or not, I don't have a strong preference.  The one thing I will say is that by having the advisor missing removes the potential for weird politics.  For instance, I have seen one or two defenses in which an advisor tends to answer questions for the student, without the student first attempting an answer.  If I were on these committees, with a relatively senior advisor, it might be politically awkward to ask them not to do this.  Luckily this issue hasn't come up for me, but I could imagine it happening.

Obviously I don't really expect anyone's policies to change, and I'm not even sure that they should, but I like thinking about things that I've grown used to taking for granted.  Plus, after having gone through the UK model, I think I will grill students a bit more during the Q/A time.  And if this means that fewer students ask me to be on their committees, then there's more time to blog :).