phd advisors: have any of you made reading lists of papers you want all your students to be familiar with? or maybe you build these for individual new students? does your group have a “canon”?
@chrisamaphone i work on too many different topics to have a canonical list. Then again our PhD model is very different from the US one. Our students will typically start with a thesis topic in mind, so the reading follows the project.
@liamoc@chrisamaphone Same situation here. For each student there are papers I tend to recommend but it differs. thinking back to my phd, bob harper never told me what papers to read. there was kind of "cmu pop group canon" that I was aware of, and as someone interested in the topic who knows how to use Google, I had read most of those papers automatically anyway.
With my own students, i tend to just send them home with papers when topics come up rather than try to front load an onboarding curriculum.
@liamoc@jonmsterling part of why i think about this sometimes is that the cmu pop group very much does have a canon, even one that has been pretty stable over multiple decades i would say, but none of our advisors would ever admit this, much less tell us what was in it. karl’s “classic papers” class was very useful in this regard but of course woefully incomplete… i wish it had been repeated and iterated upon
@chrisamaphone@jonmsterling now that you mention it fabian muehlboeck and peter hoefner have started a classic pl papers course here, which is fairly targeted towards students interested in pursuing our (short by US standards) PhD programme after they graduate from their honours or masters. I think it's good to expose students who haven't started a PhD topic yet to a wide variety of important papers like this, but in the AU/UK system where students start a PhD with a topic ready, asking PhD students to read a canon of papers is too late. Either the papers won't be relevant to their research or they would have read the papers already, and don't need re-exposure to them.
@liamoc Are your incoming PhDs mostly your graduating UG/MSc students? If not, it would be nice to be transparent about the ANU canon for the benefit of (and indeed, to attract) migrating students.
@jer_gib i should say that I wouldn't necessarily expect my incoming PhD students to have read the list of classics in the papers course (and indeed, none of them have taken it because it running for the first time right now), so I wouldn't call it a "canon" in that sense. Mostly it's just a way to get some breadth.
@jer_gib in any event, i have one student working on runtime monitoring and temporal logic, one student working on kleene and relation algebras, and one (and hopefully one more soon) student working on incorrectness logic. They have some overlaps in their research for sure but I don't feel the need to prescribe some particular reading list for them. I will ask them what they think.
