First blog post of 2024. I want to welcome you all (Grady, Kevin, Yu, Het, Le, and Manal) to our summer.
This blog platform is a place where I hope that we can put formal updates on our projects. Having a forum where we write a little bit more formally about what is going on is super useful and has a different feel than Slack which is best for short form, informal questions.
For this summer, there are a few events that we may have regularly; at the moment that includes a reading group on Wednesdays at 1:30pm. I think as a group we should propose several days a week that we mostly try to be here (for example, M, W, Th). I expect to be here most days aside from some travel in early July and the middle of August.
There are some pages on this site that might be of interest, including this page of conference targets for our papers: https://blogs.gwu.edu/pless/upcomingconferences/
A quick note about the style of research group that I have --- i like to work towards unusual ideas and high impact papers. It's not my style to say "you must do X", or "I expect you to be here from 9am until 6pm". The students that have done the best with me in the past have taken that flexibility to not be stressed if they have to be out sometimes (to take care of kids, train for marathons, whatever), but then also work very hard when they can. I like that model. They have also tended to be the ones to manage projects, push new ideas to explore and push to finish papers. This is an important skill to learn, and there is value in learning it early.
In terms of this blog, I think one substantial post each week that captures what you've been working on, with nice figures etc... is really useful, and can help make paper writing be easier in the future. You can also write quick update blog posts each day that can serve as a diary, repository of cool datasets or papers you've found, etc.
I'm excited to have you all working with me; I hope that we all have a fun summer!