Photo of the Saar River, Saarbrücken

TL;DR out of the way, I'm currently visiting CISPA, AppSec group with Giancarlo Pellegrino, for a research internship.

Phew! It has been one whole year since I started applying for a visiting PhD researcher position and one week since I started. The whole thing hasn't been quick, or painless.

I wanted to write about the whole process after seeing this prompt by Kevin McDonald;

Share a recent accomplishment or achievement you're proud of.

I've never been abroad for more than a handful of days and the culture shock was real. So, thinking about recent accomplishments, I can think of two;

  • I learned how to purchase groceries (in Germany)
  • I started working with an incredible research group, at one of, if not the best security research institute in the world

The initial shock abated much more quickly than I anticipated, and I can finally reflect on what to do next.

I use vimwiki to keep a personal wiki, the "Visiting PhD" page is dated 2023-06-26. That's the date I started going over CSRankings, filtering by "Europe" and noting down researchers I would be compatible with research-area wise.

I jotted down 11 researchers, cold-emailed 4 of them, got 1 definite "no", 1 "maybe" and 1 invite for a Zoom call. One of the researchers did not reply. I believe, as far as cold e-mails go, this was close to the average odds of someone cold e-mailing potential advisors, albeit achieved with a lot fewer data points.

One year after that, I've set foot on Germany on the 30th of July. I'll be here until the 31st of January 2025.

I switched my research topic over to Web Security during the last year. It feels similar to how I felt when I switched from NLP to Security, a big relief and excitement.

For the particular topic , I think Giancarlo put it succinctly:

Yigit is working on testing and building new algorithms to improve coverage in web analysis.

Lovely.