Here I am in the summer after my third year of graduate school, (hopefully) half way through! This year was big for me in the sense that I led my own research project for the first time. I came up with the idea, assembled a team, and led the direction of the project–under the guidance of mentors. The project was about how the ways AI is portrayed can affect the beliefs people hold about the systems, which is a much more psychology/cognitive science type of project. In addition to learning skills like designing and conducting experiments with participants and running statistical analyses, I think I had two big lessons I learned about research (and really life!) more broadly that I’ll share here. For shorthand, they are:
With that, let’s dive in!
To explain both these lessons, let me provide some context on what experiences it was about: writing for an interdisciplinary journal submission with this project for the first time ever. We submitted versions of the paper for conferences back in early February, and since then have been writing up a journal version. Yes, for at least four months, I have been in the writing stage, which to any computer science PhD student is unheard of. What’s more, this was a short submission, only 3 pages total and many (myself included) would think that it should be easy. It was not easy… which brings me to my first lesson: progress is like a spiral staircase.
For months, writing felt like running in circles–moving and expending a lot of energy, but in sum going nowhere. It felt like the draft constantly grew and shrank as we added details for clarity then cut them for brevity. It never felt like the end was in sight and that my writing was the equivalent of running on a hamster wheel. Rather than seeing writing as running in circles, it was an important perspective shift to see my writing as moving up a spiral staircase instead. Maybe in the day to day and even week to week it felt like my current draft looked very similar to the draft a week ago, I had to trust that I wasn’t going in circles, but the circles were taking me upwards, I was progressing. Research is sparsely rewarding. There are few external rewards to indicate your progress, and it can feel very stagnant. It’s in these moments where it feels I am spending a lot of time on something but it feels like I’m moving in circles rather than upwards that I need to remind myself of the spiral staircase.
Life is similar. Sometimes it feels like I’m struggling with vices–like impatience–again and again and I am tempted to think, how am I still struggling with this same sin? But in the pursuit of virtue, it’s important to put aside the cyclical feeling and remember that I am moving upwards towards virtue. That I am growing.
That brings me to the second lesson: remembering I’m here to learn, not to perform. Struggling with writing was a very humbling experience. The entire project up to that point felt like I was unstoppable, each week brought tangible progress until writing. Suddenly, doubts that I was good enough to be doing my PhD flooded my mind. If you can’t even write, the voice said, you shouldn’t even be here. Let me tell you, those are lies straight from down below. The reason I am in graduate school is not to perform, but to learn. If I already knew how to submit research for a prestigious interdisciplinary journal, why would I even be in graduate school? I shouldn’t put so much pressure on myself to already have the skills. Same with life–we’ll never be perfect at anything, but we can always be growing. I strive to adopt the mindset of being a lifelong student, giving myself the grace when I fall or struggle and not expecting perfection.