Introduction to the Career Forum
Column
Welcome to the second installment of the Career Forum
column. The column, which debuted in the September 2001
issue, aims to provide career advice and practical
information to graduating students and database
professionals. In addition to the standard, 6-page
articles that cover broad topics, we plan to solicit
shorter articles (1-2 pages). Shorter articles will
present multiple (and probably different) views on
specific questions. Taking this a step further, we will
also experiment with online surveys, in order to provide
hard-to-find quantitative data on a variety of
career-related topics (a salary survey is one such
example). Survey data will be collected over the web and
tabulated into short articles for the print edition.
Finally, we are organizing the resources mentioned in
the Career Forum articles together with other helpful
web pointers into a separate section of SIGMOD Online,
tentatively under www.acm.org/sigmod/career/.
Look for this special online section in December 2001.
In order for the Career Forum column to be
successful, active participation from the database
community is required: a) we need feedback from students
and junior database professionals to make sure that we
are covering the right topics, and b) we need members of
the database community to share their experience and
advice on career-related issues. Please email me at mailto:labrinid@cs.umd.edu?subject=SIGMOD
Record - CareerForum if you want to suggest
topics/questions for articles or contribute to the
column.
Before closing, I would like to thank Ling Liu and
Rich Snodgrass for giving me the opportunity to serve as
the associate editor for the Career Forum column, as
well as for their suggestions. I would also like to
thank Alberto Mendelzon for co-authoring the ``Career-Enhancing
Services at SIGMOD Online'' article in the September
issue and Ugur Cetintemel for writing the very
informative article in this issue. Ugur Cetintemel
recently graduated from the University of Maryland and
joined Brown University as an assistant professor. His
article, ``On
the Academic Interview Circuit: An End-to-End
Discussion,'' is based on recent personal experience
and is filled with helpful advice for performing an
effective and enjoyable job search. The article is a
``must read'' for all of you that plan on interviewing
for university positions in 2002.
| Alexandros Labrinidis |
| October
2001 | |
