Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

So given what did and did not go well, this section outlines three things that will hopefully make things better next time. The first is an overarching career task that will help me articulate my priorities, which will help me make decisions more quickly. The second is my first attempt at a travel routine that will hopefully help me better sustain myself both during and after an event. And the third is my plan on how to prepare for conferences, so I get the most out of them. Articulate my "Professor Platform" To help me prioritize and quickly assess an opportunity, I want to think on my "Professor Platform." I got this idea from "The Professor is In: The Essential Guide To Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job" by Karen Kelsky . I read this book when I was job hunting. It describes the need to create a "Campaign Platform" to help frame how to present yourself to search committees. Moreover, it helps you have a set of "things about you" you c...

While my first post may have implied I had no idea why I was going to SIGCSE nor what I would do when there, I actually did have some of both. It was just not enough. So the main idea of what went well was "at least I had something instead of nothing." And having nothing would have been far worse. One straightforward thing I did to prepare was to look through the table of contents of the proceedings and bookmark interesting papers to read. However, I don't think bookmarking papers was sufficient. I should have actually looked through the papers before the conference and tried to connect with the authors if I found a paper really interesting. I had goals, but they were unclear While I said I did not have clear goals, I did have at least an idea of what I wanted my goals to be. These ideas centered around my podcast , research, and searching for people to fill my mentoring needs. Podcast For my podcast, I knew I wanted to promote it and find guest speakers. Unfortu...

SIGCSE is a fantastic conference with something for everyone. It has presentations on Computer Science (CS) learning papers and experiential reports. It is a great place to network both formally and informally. Participants discuss a vast range of topics. SIGCSE also hosts many workshops and seminars on specific tools and techniques. At my latest trip to SIGCSE, things went both well and not well. This blog post sequence is to help me unpack what happened and think through how to make things better for future conferences. To my readers, depending on what you want to get out of this, I suggest the following: If you want the long, fully-nuanced story, read everything. If you want ideas on how to get the most out of conferences by looking at mine, read, " What I will do next time ." If you want a structured way to reflect on your own latest conference, read the section headers and their intro paragraphs. The subsection headers may be useful examples to get you thinking....

Hello and welcome to my blog! It's a place I write about computer science education and what it's like to be a professor. My name is Kristin Stephens-Martinez, and I am an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Duke University  in the Computer Science Department . I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley . My Master's research work, also at UC Berkeley , is in computer networking with Vern Paxson . My research interest lies at the intersection of education and computer science focusing on using data available in large classrooms (both local and MOOCs), and I was advised by Armando Fox . I used to sit in the Berkeley institute of design (BiD) lab . My specific research interest is on inspecting data from classrooms to find interpretable data-driven insights that help instructors find ways to improve their course material. My most recent work was a qualitative analysis on constructed response wrong answers from "What would Python display?" question ...