Yixin Zou

Academic Job Search

I was on the academic job market in the 2021-2022 cycle. Below are my materials:

  • Research Statement
  • Teaching Statement
  • Job Talk Slides

    • There are also some invaluable resources that greatly helped me with my job search:

  • "The Job Market" by Kira Goldner
  • "Guide for the CS/IS Tenure-Track Job Market" by Shomir Wilson
  • "The academic job search for computer scientists in 10 questions" by Nicolas Papernot and Elissa Redmiles
  • "Computer Science Graduate Job and Interview Guide" by Kevin Angstadt and Madeline Endres

    • Advice and Guides

    It has been on my to-do list (forever) to systematically document my answers to frequently asked questions about research, writing, presenting, careers, and more. While I work on that, here are some excellent advice repositories from others:

  • "Advice" by Shomir Wilson
  • "Awesome Tips" by Jia-Bin Huang
  • "The Tao of PhD" by University of Washington CSE
  • "The CS Assistant Professor Handbook" by Vijay Chidambaram

    • Additionally, I have shared the following guides with students and collaborators many times that I must highlight them individually:

  • PhD applications: CS/HCI PhD Application Review Program Tracker by Andrew Kuznetsov, letter of recommendations guide by EPFL EPIC, and template "cheat sheet" for letter writers
  • Starting an advising relationship: templates for developing shared expectations (for PhD students and interns) and individual development plan (for postdocs)
  • Navigating the PhD journey: "The Mosaic Art Approach to a Dissertation and Research Portfolio" and "The Goal of a PhD Program is Not to Write and Publish Research Papers" by Yoshi Kohno
  • Literature review and academic writing: "literature search for related work", "writing the related work section", and "style guide" by Nathan Malkin
  • Conference overview and deadline countdowns: security venues, HCI venues, and usable security and privacy venues
  • Writing and dealing with reviews: "An Unofficial Guide to Seven Stages of Reviewing for CHI" by Neha Kumar, guidelines on writing constructive reviews by Thomas Pasquier and derived from ACM CCS reviewer guidelines, and "Reviewer Critiques (Qualitative Methods) and How to Respond to Them" by Jessica Vitak
  • Academic talks: "10 tips for academic talks" by Matt Might, "How to Give an Academic Talk" by Paul N. Edwards, and "guide to giving HCI conference talks" by Abraham Mhaidli

    • Books

    I maintain a curated list of books on human-centered security, privacy, critical AI research, and research methods here – both for my own use and to share with my group. If you’re at MPI-SP or RUB and would like to borrow a physical copy, just drop me a message!

    Tools

    Below is a collection of software tools that I find useful for my research, teaching, and collaboration (section inspired by Jan Tolsdorf).

    Literature Management

  • Zotero (for managing literature, sharing libraries of related work, plugins available for Word, Google Docs, and Overleaf)
  • Rayyan (for collaborating on systematic literature reviews and early-stage filtering)
  • Online BibTeX Tidy (for cleaning and formatting BibTeX files)

    • Data Collection and Analysis

  • Prolific (for recruiting participants for online studies)
  • Qualtrics (survey software, lots of built-in features, licenses could be expensive)
  • RStudio (for running statistical analysis in R)
  • G*Power (for statistical power analysis)
  • noScribe (offline, privacy-friendly audio transcription)
  • ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and Dedoose (advanced qualitative data analysis; license fees vary)

    • Design

  • Miro (online whiteboard for collaborative brainstorming and design)
  • Figma (collaborative web application for interface design)

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