My Experience At Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop At Splash 2020

Functional programming, does the term not seem cool? This led me to explore what research area it came under in the past summer, then came my attempt to learn haskell. Programming languages it was, oh was there not so much.

I randomly came across this article about PLMW co-located with various conferences. This year it was all virtual and the workshop was aimed towards later undergrads and early grads navigating through re-search and the options they had. If accepted to the workshop, we would get a complimentary registration to the OOPSLA, ECOOP and all the conferences co-located with SPLASH 2020 virtually. I had never attended an academic conference (even though due to a lot of them being virtual offering free access; this one didn’t). I wanted to explore! I applied, and somewhere around the start of november I came to know that I had been accepted. Again, maybe it is much easier to accomodate more people virtually than in person?

Whatever it was, I was excited. I went around, attended talks and notes through the conference. I also tried to read few research papers (as much I could understand with my learning since I have to yet to actually take PL or adv PL/compilers course at my college). During the PLMW, I got to interact with a bunch of professors, researchers and PhD students – who had volunteered to be mentors for the workshop. They had these rooms with one mentor each which students could join, interact (with audio/video on) and then hop on to other rooms. I listened to students talking about their research and discussing. Various mentors also encouraged me to find professor at my college and get started with something - because me being a sophomore should not stop me from getting started with research at undergraduate level. A lot of them also named few professors from IIT Delhi when I mentioned I studied there, which made me re-realise that I do actually study CS at one of the best places in the country.

I’m most proud of myself asking questions at the workshop and conferences even though I was afraid due to my practically non-existing background. The mentors were really nice and warm. They understood my novice position. I also had the opportunity to talk to fellow mentee students. Grads students do have a good nerd sense of humour, it was fun. Thanks to the time-zones I was up until 1 am on a day for this workshop. This was such a new experience and it certainly helped instill preliminary interest in me regarding this research area. I look forward to attending another virtual PLMW (possibly in a different format than this one) at POPL 2021.