When you arrive at the Concurrent Systems Architecture Group, one of the most important things is to establish rich communication with as many member of the group as possible. This will help you to get “up to speed” as quickly as possible on the wide range of research projects, and also keep you informed about group meetings, lunches, activities, social functions, etc. Here are several things you should do:
· Spend as much time as possible around to lab, making friends in getting involved in informal discussions, and pitching in to keep our group computing and networking infrastructure running. This is a great way to learn!
· Get electronically connected, by getting an email address on csag.ucsd.edu (this is where all the group email goes). You can read your email from another address if you prefer, but you are responsible for making sure that email sent to your csag.ucsd.edu address gets to you.
· Get onto the relevant general group mailing lists (csag-grads, csag-staff, csag-postdocs, csag-all) and the relevant project mailing lists. For example, at the present time, we have optiputer, vgrads, mgrid, and stedi mailing lists for the major projects in the group.
· Get onto MSN messenger. We use this for a wealth of communication. Email your MSN message contact name to the csag-all list, so we can all add you to our contact lists.
· Interact! Make it a point to ask your colleagues (fellow CSAGers and other folks in the department) about what they’re working on. Try to understand what they’re doing, why its important, and what their approach is. Go to lunch and talk about things. Go to seminars and ask questions. Work on a short description of your research interests and activities. You should be able to give a short description (2-3 sentences) or a much longer one which explains what you’re doing, why its important, and what the novelty of your approach is…