For the last three years I’ve been a computer science grad student at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. I received a master’s degree late last year, and was working toward my PhD. CITP is full of talented people doing important work. I’ve learned a lot and became close friends with many of my colleagues. It’s been a particular privilege to study under my brilliant advisor, Ed Felten.
The function of a computer science PhD program is to prepare you for a career doing academic computer science research. I went to grad school expecting to excel at this, but in recent months it has become clear to me that my talents are better suited to writing about public policy. So I’ve asked Princeton for a one-year leave of absence. I’ll have an option to return to school in 2012, but I don’t expect to exercise it.
For you, my readers, this means you’ll be hearing from me more often. I’ve committed to spend the majority of my time writing for Ars Technica, the best technology news site on the web. I’ll link to some of those articles here, and I’m also hoping to do more original writing here at Bottom-up.
For the editors in the audience: my relationship with Ars leaves me some time to work on other projects. So if you’d like to pay me to write for you, please get in touch.
will you have an RSS feed for your work over at Ars Technica?
Congrats! Sounds like you’ve made the right choice; too many people spend years in grad school without realizing it’s not really the path they want to be on.
Looking forward to seeing more of your stuff on Ars.
Same question here. Is there an RSS feed for your writings only? Whenever I try to punch in the feed for the page you linked to, it tries to subscribe me to the whole Ars Technica feed.
I just want to second what Nick said. There are a lot of pressures in graduate school, and one of the big ones is to view anything other than completing a PhD and obtaining a tenure-track academic position as failure. This is not only the absolute wrong way to view graduate school, but it often functions as a serious setback for folks in their eventual career plans. Congratulations on avoiding this pitfall! I love your writing, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of it.
Well you are very good at writing about public policy. Seems to me that a lot of academic computer science with policy implications is of limited value unless there’s a body of folks who can engage the reading public in the debate without someone to explain what it means to the interested layman without grotesque over-simplification. And you’re one of a few people who do that well.
Seconded on the RSS feed.
Hi everyone,
I’ve asked the appropriate guy at Ars but haven’t gotten a response yet. I’ll let you know what I hear. Thanks for reading!
What Massey said.
Ars tells me they don’t have per-author reviews and encourage people to use Yahoo! Pipes. Maybe I’ll try to whip up a Pipes feed that combines my writing at the various outlets I write for.