Speakers: Jonathan Grudin and Umer Farooq Title: Where to Go After Grad School: A Discussion about Jobs and Careers Abstract: Both of us have academic and industry research laboratory experience. We also both worked in industry product development groups after getting our PhDs, Jonathan as a software engineer at Wang Laboratories in the 1980s and Umer as a user experience researcher in the Server & Tools Division at Microsoft where he is now. The viability of academic and research lab paths is quite evident, although students often have questions about their relative merits and drawbacks, and we will spend some time on this facet. Less clear to many students today are the possibilities for staying active in research while working in non-research jobs, as we did. This does not preclude an eventual return to research; in fact, it can be a less stressful and a more impactful and successful path in the long run, if undertaken thoughtfully by someone with appropriate interests and skills. It is also possible that changes in the field make this especially attractive at this time. We will describe some merits and drawbacks of academic, industry research, and industry development paths, illustrated with brief biographical sketches of graduates from the 80s, 90s, and 00s (not only our own). We’ll also leave time for discussion. Bio: Jonathan Grudin After getting a PhD in cognitive psychology with Don Norman, Jonathan did a postdoc in a government research lab, then spent three years as a software engineer. He subsequently drifted back into research, eventually becoming Professor of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. He is now a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Affiliate Professor at the Information School. He was Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, is co-chairing iConference 2011 with Harry Bruce (and a superlative committee doing most of the work), and is co-program chair for CSCW 2012. Both conferences will be in Seattle. Bio: Umer Farooq With a background in computer science, Umer finished his PhD in information sciences and technology with John M. Carroll from Penn State. During his graduate work, Umer did summer stints at IBM T.J. Watson Researcher Center and SRI International. He is now a User Experience Researcher at Microsoft. For the products Umer works on, his end users are highly technical developers, which presents a unique user experience dilemma: Do developers really care about usability, given that they are so tech savvy? While shipping Visual Studio 2010, Umer actively worked with product teams to convey that developers are in fact human and they too prefer a usable product.