Mysterious grad school II

Recap and some updates

At the beginning of my ongoing PhD, I thought it would be interesting and informative if I can keep blogging about grad school, my personal experience, and my thoughts about doing (systems) research, and that is why I wrote the first one of this series and posted it in Dec 2018. As some audience might know, grad school is actually full of non-determinism (funny since my research, or say systems research is about studying determinism), I was dragged into lots of work, services, and squeezing time to live my personal life. While swamped with responsibilities I can't escape, I was not able to keep blogging.

I am writing this blog as I am taking today off. And it is probably the beginning of a new series of blogs. I plan to talk about some different aspects other than grad school later too (topics I have in mind are systems research, development/programming/setup, Rust the programming language and some other things within the realm of PhD life).

It has been some time, what have I done?

Well, to speak frankly, not very much. The same project that I might have discussed is still pending --- hopefully it can get into a decent shape, so we can submit it soon. During the one year and a half, several iterations of the design and implementation are done and we are working on finalizing the project and writing the paper. It might sound a bit weird since the idea of the project is already there when I entered grad school (my advisor pitched it when I was interviewed!). But it is the sad nature of many systems research --- each project is multi-student multi-year effort. And if you have read the famous The Mythical Man-Month, adding more cook in the kitchen is not always helpful. I will discuss a bit more about my own experience while working my research but that is going to be the topic of later section.

There are many other things that I have done, I might have listed them on my CV if they are formally related to my academic career (such as been awarded a travel grant for some conference, official service for the college etc). I did have participated in every season of faculty hiring here but since I am not officially serving on the committee, that is not listed --- I indeed had a great time, and it was wonderful to interact with PhD students that have passed the hurdle.

I have also finished all my PhD required courses, phew! Believe me it was not a fun experience --- of the four courses I have to do, I don't have a decent grasp of any of them which means it took me a certain amount of time to finish. I would say they probably will be benefitial in the long run (not right now).

Pandemic

Perhaps I should note that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed everyone's life around the world, and so am I. Not able to go to office and working from home for a very long time is not fun. Thankfully, the academia is here to help --- lots of conferences have moved to virtual and also lowered their registration fees (some of them are even live streamed on Youtube!). Everything else is still functional remotely, I was able to attend group meetings weekly, talk to my advisor via zoom calls, and fix issues via sending emails. Being able to do my research completely remotely is great --- I just need to manage my time and my stress myself.