During the 3rd week of October, I was in Eindhoven, Netherlands for the Doctoral Symposium at the 3rd International Conference for Software Language Engineering. I have to say I have been slightly nervous for the last week or so, mostly as this is my first paper submitted anywhere and I’m nervous I will look some sort of fool. Anyhow, over the next few days I will just reporting on what I’ve been seeing about and who I’ve met and spoken to.

Lets get started with the symposium. Firstly in the morning 10 of the 13 people accepted were chosen to give presentations on their work. Unsurprisingly I am not one of the picked, as well I haven’t even had my proposal approved yet, and I haven’t really made any contribution yet!

The level of the submissions was in my mind exceptional, though I feel that perhaps my paper was not totally fitted to the conference as a lot of the research was in the region of programming abstract grammers (I definitely learnt something new while I was there).

Anyhow, later that afternoon I received my mentoring session by two well known field leaders. The feedback I got mostly relates to the stage I am in, and therefore I need to drill down more in my topic, as currently it is too broad. With this in mind, the main thing I can do for now is read!