Grad School Diaries: One Year Down

I’m done with my first year of graduate school. The sun’s out. I’m alive. Yay.

The last semester was a long one. Some days I was motivated to work on my assigned projects; other days I wanted to drop them, drop out, and do something completely different. Mostly I felt like a directionless ship in the ocean without any stars or a compass to guide me.

Yet, somehow, here I am, newly arrived, on the coastline of some familiar land. Another ending, another beginning.

So, what have I learned so far?

On Perserverance

Graduate school is a lot like learning how to slackline. It’s difficult at first as you build your muscles and learn how to keep your balance. You will fall, a lot, and everyone else will seem like they’re masters of academic gymnastics. But if you keep at it, you will get better. At utilizing your strengths. At asking for help. At knowing when to push and when to rest. At learning. At being kind to yourself.

It truly is a game of perseverance. It only ends when you put away the slackline.

On Doing and Thinking

I worked on a research project with one of my classmates, Julia, exploring what we called ‘Character Space’ using online survey data. The survey consisted of 200+ personality ratings for each of 800 fictional characters from shows like Avatar: the Last Airbender and LOST. Rather than describe each character in terms of all the traits, we wondered if instead they could be described in terms of some combination of them. For example, if Aang from Avatar took a test like the Myer-Briggs (a psychologically invalid and meaningless test btw), what would his four letters be?

We used Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to explore this question. Neither of us knew anything about the method, but it was relatively easy to implement using the programming language Python. We got immediate results, but it wasn’t clear what the dimensions meant. That became the bulk of our project – retracing our steps and digging through the linear algebra so that we could describe the character space. Only then were we able to make reasonable (if you squint your eyes enough) conclusions, and explain the limitations of our approach.

Perhaps it was necessary for us to use these tools without having full knowledge of how they worked; it’s too easy to fall into academic analysis paralysis, to spend too much time in the weeds of the mechanics, to never produce anything. But it certainly would have helped if either of us had the prior knowledge.

Much of research, and life, is like this: No matter how prepared you are, you are constantly working with the unknown. This isn’t to say that preparation and understanding aren’t necessary, just that they aren’t sufficient on their own. One has to teeter between thinking and doing, perhaps with a slight bent toward the latter. The goal is always to produce knowledge, to live life, not to sit around and think about it.

On Projects and Priorities

I took more of a supportive role this semester in the two research projects I worked on. This made me feel somewhat guilty because I believed I was supposed to be the person spearheading ideas and paving the direction of each project. What helped was realizing that research is a collaborative effort, and that I actually enjoyed serving as a second hand.

A friend of mine in a neuroimaging graduate program had posted on Instagram asking if anyone could help her with some technical issues related to her final project. I offered a hand, and we were able to quickly resolve the issue that had stumped her the entire day. She thanked me for the help, and also for running the summer programming workshop I had organized a few years ago when she was still a research assistant in my lab. I had forgotten about that and how fun it was to teach and help others be successful. Perhaps there’s a direction here. I want to continue working on interesting, meaningful problems, without necessarily being the lead researcher.

On Asking the Right Questions

It’s really hard to ask the right questions.

Sometimes they’re productive and lead to generative insights. Often times they lead us down rabbit holes that only reveal to us our capacity for blind tenacity, a trait that is commonly exploited in academia.

That’s a big part of science: Refining the questions we ask, exploring them, and helping others ask better ones with what we find. Maybe there are no right questions, simply better ones.

On Faith the Future

All scientists are secretly operating on faith, perhaps without explicitly acknowledging it. We have at best tentative answers, which are outnumbered by the questions yet explored.

I still have no clue what I’m doing. I feel an urge to sharpen my math and statistics, to read some research papers, to dive into bookmarked lectures. Yet how much of this is due to the mimetic trap? To the demands and pressure of the academic world?

Maybe, right now, it’s better to do nothing. To let my mind wander and be fertile again. To figure things out as I go. To have some faith in myself. For now, I have a stack of neglected books dying to be read, a guitar that needs playing, a girlfriend to love, and words to write.