The USENIX Association Student Outreach Program

Robyn Landers - UW Campus Outreach Representative


USENIX is the UNIX and Advanced Computing Systems Association. They do all sorts of things relating to UNIX (and more); in particular, they organize a variety of conferences on topics such as system administration, operating systems, file system and storage technologies, networking, programming languages, security, women in advanced computing, and much more.

The USENIX student program offers grants for students to attend conferences, and cash awards for the best student paper presented at their conferences. They also offer a very low membership fee for students, giving you access to their online resources (conference videos, publications, etc.), discounts for O'Reilly books, and more.

Visit my office to borrow hard copies of conference proceedings and ;login: magazine, to see brochures for upcoming conferences, or for more information about the USENIX student program.

Over the years UW students have attended conferences such as: the general technical conference, LISA, security, Tcl/Tk, Java/JVM, security, COOTS, NSDI, and OSDI. Here are some student quotes:

- Learned a lot at and made many connections for prospective employment.

- Very interesting and useful, particularly the tutorials and invited talks.

- Quite educational.

- Chance to meet big names in the Industry (I got to meet Andy Tanenbaum) as well as people from big companies (IBM, Google, MS, HP, etc...). There is an attendee list that you're given on the first day, so it's easy to tell if cool people are there.

- Chance to see what research is like. There was a poster session where grad students presented posters with their current Works-In-Progress. This also means that the big names were walking around and giving the students a hard time -- asking tough questions (lots of fun to be had watching those discussions :-).

- Chance to learn who does what. I'm interested in systems research, so it let me get a feel for what kind of topics are hot, who is doing what at which uni's (for example ETH Zurich has a Systems Group). On top of that, I met a group of profs who had a BOFS about "Systems Education in Undergrad" which was really interesting.


[BACK] Back to my home page on math.uwaterloo.ca.