Birds of a Feather

TCHPC Career Panel

Authors: Sanjukta Bhowmick (University of North Texas), Aditya Devarakonda (Wake Forest University), Manish Parashar (University of Utah)

Abstract: This BoF will be in the form of a panel consisting of representatives from the industry, national labs, and academia with a background in HPC. The panel will share advice on different career options in HPC, and their experiences in their respective career trajectories. The primary audience for this event is current, preferably ABD, graduate students. The format will include a brief introduction by each speaker, followed by a moderated discussion based on a set of previously submitted questions and ending with further questions from the audience.

Long Description: The primary goal of this BOF is to inform early career students in HPC about the different career paths available. We aim to create a diverse panel with representatives from R1 universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, national labs, and industry. The audience for this event is current graduate students and post-doctoral researchers in the field, who will be in the job market within the next 5 years.

Our proposed BOF complements other career oriented events being held at SC, such as the one-on-one mentor-protégé program, women in SC, the early career program, and the more industry focused job fair, by providing information about multiple career options and trajectories from a group of panelist who work in different areas of HPC. While some of the events mentioned above require pre-applications, as a BoF, our event will be available to all technical program attendees. We are planning on having a panel of 5-6 panelists and a moderator. A majority of the time will be spent on audience interaction.

In preparation for the panel, we will reach out to the attendees of the Students@SC and the doctoral showcase programs, the graduate and undergraduate research poster presenters, and the student authors of papers to ask them to submit questions/topics that they would like the panel to discuss. We will collaborate with the doctoral showcase chair, the graduate posters chair, the undergraduate posters chair and the Students@SC chair to advertise our BoF.

In the BoF, our panelists will discuss their career choices, as well as answer questions from the moderator and audiences. Our goals are to expose graduate students to diverse career paths, to enable them to build connections with faculty and industry representatives, and to create a forum for a free and frank discussion on tradeoffs between these different possible career paths.

As in the past sessions, we will finalize the panel about a month before the conference, based on the list of attendees to the conference, and the questions submitted by the students. Our past panels have included at least one woman representative and diverse institutional and industry participation, including members from industry, national labs, program directors of federal agencies, as well as faculty from academic institutions.

This BOF is being organized by the TCHPC Educational Outreach Initiative (https://tc.computer.org/tchpc/home-page/education-outreach/) and will be cross advertised by TCPP and the SIGHPC Educational Outreach Initiative. We expect that similar to last year, there will be some travel funding from TCHPC available for students to attend SC23.



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