PhD Students' Experience

SMU has strong ties with academia and industry that provided me with opportunities to pursue an exchange programme at Carnegie Mellon University and two internships at Microsoft Research, USA. As an intern at Microsoft, I worked with best in class researchers and got opportunities to interact with distinguished scientists and fellow interns from across the globe. The intellectual cohort of students at SMU from diverse backgrounds makes for a great learning environment. My professors always encouraged me to give my best be it actively participating in classes, working on group projects or publishing in top-tier conferences and journals. Apart from the classes and research, SMU provides numerous opportunities for learning and growth such as advanced scientific writing and presentation training, English lessons and career development workshops to ensure holistic development of students.

A generous support from SMU helped me travel for conferences and present my work to the research community and at the same time learn about different cultures and practices. I represented SMU at the Global Young Scientists Summit and the Royal Society Commonwealth Conference. While excelling in my research, SMU’s open environment also provided me with opportunities to actively participate in co-curricular activities. Together with another PhD student, I was instrumental in starting the SMU PhD Student Life Committee to build a cohesive PhD community through organizing professional and social events such as the first Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. As the President of Sikh society at SMU, I organized cultural immersion tours for international students, participated in inter-faith forums and led a dance team.

During my PhD at the School of Computing and Information Systems in SMU, I was always given the freedom to choose projects that I wanted to work on. I was also encouraged to suggest and pursue projects that I found interesting. While some of the projects required inter-disciplinary collaboration, others required external collaborations. During my PhD, I have always been encouraged to collaborate with other researchers. I have not only collaborated with researchers from SMU, but also with researchers from other institutes such as University of Hawaii, IBM India Research Labs as well as from Samsung Research America in several projects. In addition to spending 9 months at Carnegie Mellon University as a research scholar, for my summer internships, I have also spent 3 months at IBM India Research Labs and Samsung Research America during the 2nd and 4th year of my PhD candidature respectively. While the collaborations have given me the opportunity to work on interesting projects and topics, working on these diverse projects has helped me in becoming a more systematic and independent researcher.

What I learned in SMU has enabled me to conduct research, manage my life and chase my dream. SCIS tries very hard to help us to be competitive by designing various training programmes, which certainly have a long term positive effect on us. The professors in SCIS are nice and willing to talk to us. I’ve benefited a lot from communicating with both my advisor and many other professors. It’s also very special and attractive that most professors work closely with their students, which can quickly help the students to get on the right track of doing research. The four research clusters SCIS choose to focus on are all important topics with big impact. If you try your best in learning and creating in your research area, you will get paid off very soon!

I did my undergraduate and post graduate in SMU and those are the best years of my life. I met amazing friends who are talented and driving and mentors who are very supportive and naturing. I had the opportunity to travel to Switzerland for a conference, took classes at Carnegie Mellon University and worked in Samsung Research America. I thank every professor, staff member, teammate, classmate and friend from SMU for making me become who I am today.

The PhD of Information Systems programme in SMU gives students enough exposure in communicating and cooperating with both internal and external researchers. Moreover, this programme provides a lot of opportunities to improve students across multiple disciplines. During each semester, SMU organises various training seminars to help students learn from professional coaches to improve research writing and presentation skills, teaching skills, English speaking and even the etiquette for dressing and dinning. We benefit a lot from these seminars and training courses.

Going through different states of the PhD program in SMU, I was exposed to various aspects of research. I participated in multiple projects on data analysis and mining. These projects helped me to acquire a solid background in big data analysis, advance working and communication skills, and more importantly, to gain a concrete view of research work. In addition, collaborating in projects with experts of different disciplinary taught me how computational methods may benefit research in other disciplines. All these valuable experiences have gradually developed me to an independent researcher and brought me the confidence to build a career in academic.