Why I picked University life (dictated into my MAC) If

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Sometimes I look back and wonder why I chose the academic path. In my  
early years I had my pick of almost any organization in the United  
States to go to. I think what became the most important issue to me  
was the interaction I had with students. Every four years a new set of  
students arrive. Many of these students would challenge my ideas and   
my directions and often, at least occasionally :-) ,they were correct.  
They kept me young intellectually and help me inspect fields of  
research that I would never have attempted.

Many of my graduate students especially have been non-standard in the  
sense that a normal graduate admissions procedure would have rejected  
them period!! Many of the undergraduates that I worked with were  
motivated, hopefully by my impact, to go on and get advanced degrees  
and to do exceptionally well in their chosen fields. I insisted and  
continued to insist that students choose their own research  
directions. I will certainly suggest to them interesting topics but  
I'd rather them find topics that they think are interesting and then  
to convince me that in fact they should work on those topics.

I try to teach them, hopefully by example, how researcher operates.  
When I was at Bell laboratories, often potential employees would have  
no real idea of what they were going to do once they completed their  
thesis. I wanted my students to understand how to find problems .

One of the greatest rewards I've had is to sit on a panel at a good  
conference with the  other panelist including two or  three of my  
former students. I also take pride in a comment that one of my better  
students made to me several years after he graduated. He said when he  
graduated he was not sure what I contributed to his research. He then  
said after several years he realized what I had done and how I had  
helped him and molded him  and he hoped he could do the same for his  
future students.


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