Research Office Hours for Undergraduates (ROHU)

Due to COVID-19, we’re not meeting in person. However, I’m happy to set up a meeting with any undergraduate interested in NLP or ML research!! No experience required.

Hi, I’m John. I use he/him pronouns.

Finding a professor to do research with can be a huge barrier to entering research as an undergraduate, and meeting with a professor can be really intimidating. Though I am not a professor, I’m offering a weekly “research office hours” event in an attempt to provide mentorship, advice, and teaching for research-interested undergraduates.

You don’t need to know anything about research, or about my field of natural language processing, to come to these office hours. In fact, if you’re brand new to all these things, even better! I aim to make these hours informal spaces for chatting and learning.

I’m happy to answer questions about getting started in research, how to approach professors, or specific research topics. Feel free to come regularly as well; I’d be happy to try to guide you along the research process.

What’s in this for me? For one, I love getting people excited about expanding the frontier of knowledge. For another, I think NLP needs more diversity in the voices contributing to research. Take this blog post showing that 69% of papers published at one of our top conferences only evaluate on English for example. In short, the field needs to grow and diversify.

If you have suggestions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to email me or submit to this anonymous feedback form.

Image from xkcd.

Unrelated: Rohu