Links for
Students

Courses

Most of my courses are now available on-line.

University Resources

Advising

The CS department requires that students have their advisor's electronic approval prior to registration. I consider my role as advisor to be one of my most important at UNI.

If I am your advisor, please make an appointment to meet with me at least one week before your scheduled registration time, and come prepared!

Thinking About Grad School?

You can find information about appliying to graduate programs in computer science here at UNI on my graduate coordinator page.

If you are considering going to graduate school, here or elsewhere, then you may find the following information to be helpful:

I also really enjoyed Scott Freeman's What for Art Thou, Ph.D.?. Scott does a good job exploring graduate study from the viewpoint of "what the heck is it for?" His title refers to a doctoral degree, but I think that his article applies equally well to master's-level work -- and even, I think, to undergraduate education!

Only recently did I come across Manuel Blum's Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student. This looks like notes from slides for a talk, but Manuel tells some engaging stories and offers advice on some less common issues, such as how different advisors assign different kinds of problems to theior grad students. Well worth a read.

What Is Your Thesis?. is a nice, two-page essay by Olin Shivers that explains the difference between a thesis and a dissertation and explains why you should take care in stating your thesis clearly.

Information on Writing

Good writing is critical to good academic work -- even in computer science. Richard Gabriel often quotes the Greek historian Thucydides, "A man who has the knowledge but lacks the power to express it is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all." I will quote Gabriel, from the OOPSLA'93 panel How to Get a Paper Accepted at OOPSLA:
I won't try to teach you how to write, but I will give you one piece of advice: a computer scientist is equally a scientist and a writer -- expend the effort to learn the other half of your profession.

From a number of different sources, I have compiled a collection of writing tips.

This paper and collection are especially useful:

Here are some other links that you may find useful:
Eugene Wallingford ..... wallingf@cs.uni.edu ..... February 4, 2013