Joining · How we work
Joining the lab
For prospective graduate students and BYU undergraduates seeking research experience.
Joining · Expectations
What working here looks like
- The project is yours to run. Not a queue of tasks handed down. You will be told when a direction looks unproductive, and you are expected to push back when you think that call is wrong.
- Most projects start by building the instrument. The environment or harness that makes the question measurable, with tests and baselines solid enough that you trust your own numbers.
- Say what you are claiming and what would show it false. Two or three papers understood properly beat twenty skimmed, and a hypothesis that dies in week three beats one that dies in month six.
- Write as you go. Writing is how you find out whether you understand your own claim, so it does not wait for a submission deadline — and organized code with tracked experiments is what lets someone else regenerate your result.
In return you get a weekly hour on your project and your agenda, with an advisor who comes prepared to argue about it. That hour is also where you raise anything that is not working, including how the project is being run.
Open positions
The lab opened in August 2026 and is building its first cohort. Graduate and undergraduate researchers are being recruited now.
- Prospective graduate students. Apply to the BYU CS graduate program and name ADEPT and the research areas that pull at you in your materials. Then email me at tkillian@cs.byu.edu to say you have applied.
- BYU undergraduates. Email a short note about what you are excited about, have been building, or reading about.
- Collaborators. Write about applied problems where the usual assumptions break.