How to spend the last months of a CS postdoc usefully before leaving academia?

Question

My current computer science postdoc ends in the summer. I'm planning to leave academia after that. For the purpose of this question, because reasons I won't go into, we may assume I will never return to academia.

One of the peculiarities of the field of computer science is that research has not really happened if one doesn't travel to present it in a conference over 4 months after the paper has been submitted.

For all relevant conferences that take place before my contract ends, the paper submission deadlines have already passed. Since I don't know what my next job will be or in what continent I'll be living, I cannot commit to traveling to a conference after my contract ends. (And also even if I could, I would not because no matter what people say, I don't want to endorse such a practice.)

I currently have one ongoing project that I've been working on with my advisor. However, it is uncertain how much time is required to finish it. In addition, there are some ongoing projects in our group that I perhaps could join, but I don't know how much I actually could contribute to those projects.

Anyway, I'd like to spend the remaining work time of my contract doing something that's worth doing, when I'm at work working. It seems that there are no good solutions in my situation. But certainly many CS postdocs have had a similar problem before. Is there a solution to this that I'm missing?

Answer 1

Perhaps your advisor has one or more students that could benefit from more mentoring than the advisor can supply?

Helping young graduate students learning to do research and write papers would be worth doing in its own right. If you are going on to an industry career mentoring junior programmers would be a valuable skill. It would be a different sort of experience to put on your resume when job hunting, not just more of the same.

Answer 2

Your contract runs out and you want to leave academia but you still want to do something useful for your advisor. That is very honorable and Patricia Shanahan's answer has a good idea for that. But even if you don't do anything that your advisor finds useful, not a lot of bad can come from it (assuming you don't need recommendation letters, but academic letters are rarely needed in industry).

So go job hunting and polish your CV. Do some online courses or study some material that seems useful for your industry career. Slack off for a bit if you feel you need it.

You should set things up for a smooth transition for your advisors group, so make sure the other group members can continue your projects where appropriate. Beyond that it is ok if you don't produce any more ground breaking research in your last few weeks.

Answer 3

One of the peculiarities of the field of computer science is that research has not really happened if one doesn't travel to present it in a conference over 4 months after the paper has been submitted.

This is not true.

What is true is that if a researcher writes a paper, publishes it and then immediately afterwards leaves academia without doing anything to promote the work, then unless the research is obviously important/of very high quality, it will likely go unnoticed and will end up having little to no impact on the field. In that sense, it is as if the research “has not really happened”. But the point is that this is (almost) equally true for papers presented at a conference as for papers published in a different format. Conferences are of course important in computer science, but your logic of “there are papers I can write, but the conference deadlines have all passed. Oh well, I guess I’ll go find something else to do with my time” doesn’t add up.

Anyway, I'd like to spend the remaining work time of my contract doing something that's worth doing, when I'm at work working. [...]. Is there a solution to this that I'm missing?

If you have good ideas for research papers, involving research that you are excited about and think have value for the research community, the best thing that you can do is to write those papers and publish them - online, in a journal, or any other venue that it’s practical to publish in. This is the main “work duty” of a research postdoc.

Now, if you don’t have research ideas, or at least good ideas that you are excited about and think have value for your research community, then some alternatives to consider are teaching, mentoring, outreach, or developing software that might benefit our supervisor or other researchers. But I also wonder why you are staying on until the summer in the first place. A postdoc who doesn’t want to do research is probably not producing the maximal utility/happiness either for themselves or for their sponsor. The best thing to do may be to find another job as soon as you can and move on to a more fruitful/fulfilling employment situation.

Good luck!

Answer 4

I've got a few suggestions, some of which have been noted already.

1. Document your work. Make it easy for other people to pick up where you left off. This is especially true for coding projects. You also want to make sure that any logistical responsibilities you handled are ready to be handed-off as well.

2. Assist someone else. Just because you can't go to a conference doesn't mean no one can. Perhaps there are tasks you can do to strengthen a paper a grad student is working on; there may be something time-intensive or disinteresting to the grad student that could get you authorship. You could also consider mentoring undergraduate students in the work you're doing; if you let them take the lead on the research, they can take the lead when submitting.

3. Promote your existing work. Make your code and data open-source (if your advisor allows) and easy to understand. Set up or strengthen the web presence of your work. Reach out to people at your University involved with publicizing the research going on in your lab/department/college/etc. and find out what that process is like. Look for other opportunities to promote your work, like giving talks at a department, that might be specific to your situation.

4. Just keep researching. Perhaps not directly applicable to the OP, but others might consider continuing on with research they don't intend to publish for the sake of whoever picks up the project in the future.