Both Patterson’s and Ullman’s “Viewpoint” articles in the March 2009 CACM are well worth reading, as I suspect that much of their advice for working with Ph.D. students applies more generally to working with younger people.
I was especially impressed with Ullman’s section on the importance of finding “customers” who actually need the results of the proposed research. This is also a strong feature of the Linux kernel community culture, very interesting to find a parallel in academia. I believe that it would be a very good thing if this approach were to become more widespread.
Interestingly enough, Ullman recommends this finding-customers approach even for highly theoretical theses. His reasoning seems to be that even though the chain of events from theory to practice might be extremely long and uncertain, it is critically important that the theoretician have a plausible chain in mind.
paulmckrcu 