Abstract
Many of the soft skills important for professional success in a research career are not taught in classes listed in the graduate course catalog. This talk describes the professional development goals and practices in the weekly meetings of the Signal Processing Group at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Meetings in alternate weeks switch between students discussing readings from books on important professional skills and students presenting practice conference talks. For the first semester, we read and discuss a book on scientific presentations, most recently Allen’s “The Craft of Scientific Presentations.” Book choices for the second semester in recent years include “Writing Science” by Schimel, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Tufte, and “The Signal and the Noise” by Silver. Every student gives a practice presentation every semester, and receive constructive peer and advisor critiques. The critiques are based on the framework of the book on scientific presentations we read together during the first semester. As a result, students have presented several times before an audience of their peers before their first professional conference presentations.