PhD | Faculty Allies Program
Overview
Welcome! This document summarizes the Faculty Allies program in the Stanford Computer Science Department. This document will be provided to faculty and students so that there is complete transparency about expectations on both sides. Students and faculty should carefully read the next section, which contains general information about the program. Later sections contain specific information pertaining only to students or only to faculty.
Important: This program is meant to enrich, not replace, the resources already available to PhD students. Jay Subramanian (jayanthi@stanford.edu) and Omer Reingold (reingold@stanford.edu) are always available to discuss PhD student concerns. Students can also email phdstudentservices@cs.stanford.edu with questions at any time. In particular, contacting Jay or Omer may be a more appropriate way to address severe or time-critical issues.
Purpose
This program connects CS PhD students who need advice about some aspect of their PhD experience to faculty members who have volunteered to be student allies. The program was partly motivated by the feeling expressed by multiple students in recent years that additional advice and problem-solving resources would be helpful.
A list of faculty allies and their contact information is publicly available to students and faculty. When a student contacts a faculty member, the faculty member will work with the student to find a date and time to discuss the student’s question or issue.
For the program to be successful, it is very important to understand:
- (for students) what kinds of problems this program is designed to help you with;
- (for faculty) the expectations and limits of what you are being asked to do within the program;
- (for both), there is a requirement to keep discussions confidential (with exceptions discussed below).
The main idea is that students sometimes need advice from someone else in academia who has experience and is familiar with the CS department. They might be interested in learning how faculty members dealt with specific issues when they were Ph.D. students or how they dealt with them in their groups now that they are professors.
Faculty Allies list:
