Keynote Talk
The PhD is a core formative period with a major impact on the future career, being it in academia or industry, in research or production. The PhD is a unicum in the educational path: It is profoundly different from any other formation activity, gives unique opportunities that do not return in the professional life, and shall be lived as such with no biases toward the future.

However, choices and decisions during the PhD may impact the future professional life. While the uniqueness of each individual PhD experience makes it impossible to provide rules of thumb for the best organisation of a PhD, my long lasting research experience with over thirty-five PhD students, and the participation to many doctoral symposiums and PhD schools led me to some considerations that I would like to share with the audience.

In the talk, we will touch some core questions about the relation of the PhD and future professional life. I will share some personal observations about important themes like publication strategies, presentation attitude, participation criteria, timing, collaboration, scientific production. Although my experience is largely grounded in Europe, my sabbatical periods in North America and Asia give me the opportunity to share also some considerations about differences and similarities among continents and education systems.

Mauro Pezze is a professor of software engineering at the Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca and at USI Università della Svizzera Italiana. He has served as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and ACM Transactions on Software Engineering, as general chair or the ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis in 2013, program chair of the International Conference on Software Engineering in 2012 and of the ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis in 2006. He is known for his work on software testing, program analysis, self-healing and self-adaptive software systems.