Comment by lmc
5 hours ago
Interesting, thanks for the reply. I wasn't aware grad students were so heavily involved in the review process, thought it was more postdocs.
5 hours ago
Interesting, thanks for the reply. I wasn't aware grad students were so heavily involved in the review process, thought it was more postdocs.
PostDocs review the review. PI's sign off on PD's to make sure they're not idiots. Only big labs have enough PD's to let them do reviews. And, for sure, in CS there's almost no big labs. I was under Bjarne Stroustrup, and the larger umbrella group was probably 40ish staff, in total. That'd be: 3 lead PIs (Bjarne, Nancy, Lawrence); there were a small core of assistant profs (Jaakko, Gabi, etc. — maybe 4 or 5 of them?) There were no PD's: just 25ish grad students, and then a rotating stable of undergrads. We were extremely well funded (JP Morgan, MSFT, the fed).
Our "sister" lab over in computational biology had a few PD's, but was 2x as big, and had easily 5x the funding.
Cool, thanks for the perspective.