Abstract: In this talk I will provide you with my very personal hints on how to deal with the nightmares and challenges everybody encounters during a PhD, and right after. Look at your PhD as a racing championship: you can loose one or more races for various reasons that may not even depend on you. However, only the perseverance, the continuous development of innovative solution will let you win the championship, or will let you be hired by a top team for the next year. On the one side, the talk will give you some advices from a technical point of view, including balancing theoretical research with tool development, and allocating enough resources and time to evaluate your research from different perspectives. On the other side, the talk will deal with the PhD and post-doc management issues, including adapting your work habit to a specific context, choosing publication venues, relating with your advisor, colleagues, and other researchers. In the end, as it happens for racing, the key point is having fun. If you are having fun with your research, then you will be very successful with it.
Bio:Massimiliano Di Penta is associate professor at the University of Sannio, Italy. His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, mining software repositories, empirical software engineering, search-based software engineering, and testing. He is author of over 250 papers appeared in international journals, conferences and workshops, and received various awards for his research and reviewing activity, including two most influential paper awards and three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards . He serves and has served in the organizing and program committees of over 100 conferences such as ICSE, FSE, ASE, ICSME, ICST, MSR, SANER, ICPC, GECCO, WCRE, and others. He is currently member of the steering committee of ICSME, MSR, and PROMISE. Previously, he has been steering committee member of other conferences, including ICPC, SSBSE, CSMR, SCAM, and WCRE. He is in the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the Empirical Software Engineering Journal edited by Springer, and of the Journal of Software: Evolution and Processes edited by Wiley.