Blogs: By Author

Comedy Lab

How a research group in EECS became stand-up comedians in 10 weeks

JUL 2019
by Helen X.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
One year ago, my advisor, Prof. Charles Leiserson in CSAIL, arranged for our research group to take a stand-up comedy class with Dana Jay Bein, a local comedian with Improv Boston. Charles sold it to us as an...

Policy Debate vs. Research

Applying high school debate skills to PhD research

JUNE 2018
by Helen X.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Unlike many of my fellow graduate students in computer science who have been doing programming and math competitions since high school (or potentially earlier), I spent six years in middle and high school in policy debate. This usually meant...

Teaching as a Graduate Student

My experience as a TA and advice for future TA's

MARCH 2018
by Helen X.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
When I signed up to be a teaching assistant for MIT’s performance engineering course (6.172) in Fall 2017, multiple people warned me about how much work it would be. Their advice made me nervous...