Reflections on First Year
It’s now been about a week since my CS8903 (special projects research) paper has been turned in, which means that technically, my first year of the PhD is finished. Which is difficult to believe, in all honesty. I wasn’t ready for the absolute whirlwind that this year was, even if everyone in my life kept telling me it would be rough. I can’t quite describe the shock of going from eating meals at a dining hall surrounded by people your age, seeing 4-5 professors regularly every week, and having a set class schedule, to learning to be an adult while working 60-80 hour weeks whose two touchpoints are 30 minute meetings with your advisor.
I decided to write this out partly as a memory capsule for myself, partly as a “what I’d wish I’d known” for students from nontraditional backgrounds.
Things That Rocked
- Labmates! My labmates (both those in my labspace and specifically those who share my advisor) are some of the kindest and most generous people I’ve met. Whether it was offering help getting a monitor or navigating funding issues, they always made time to lend a helping hand.
- Learning new things. Doing research kind of feels like trying to drink out of a firehose. And coming from a math background basically every action item means learning everything involved from first principles. I feel like I got to learn by trying and failing a lot, and that felt exhilarating, most of the time. One week I’d have to learn a new framework, or how to setup a logging system, or use a couple new libraries.
- Talking to people about research. Whether my advisor, labmates, visiting professors. Listening to lectures or just having chats about people’s work never really loses its sparkle. Some stuff (cough architecture cough) went right over my head, but you get to see everyone pushing human knowledge incrementally forward in different ways. . .all in the same school.
Things That Were Rough
- Adulting, personally and professionally. I suck at cooking and gave myself food poisoning 5 times. Also, suddenly had to manage a bunch more bills, keep a whole apartment clean (also furnish it), and figure out food, while pulling some really crazy hours. Also had to learn (and am still learning, tbh) how to communicate technical ideas in an advising meeting at the right granularity. And how to set boundaries. And sometimes I’d miscommunicate and only find out 3 weeks later when the misunderstanding turned into a huge project bottleneck.
- Initial loneliness. I deluded myself into thinking I was prepared for the experience of starting a PhD at 21. . .I kinda have to laugh at myself now. It felt like all my friends were experiencing being college seniors, setting up job offers, and making early-twenties memories, and I was trying to masquerade as a 28 year old with the ability to self-direct and achieve work-life balance. Nowadays it’s honestly really fun being the “designated gen-z” of my colleague/friend group, but for a while I didn’t really know what to talk to people about, and felt like a little alien.
- The pace. I don’t think undergrad interns are really exposed to the full pressure of being scooped when we join labs, and feeling that pressure to learn and master things on short timelines made me cut a lot of health corners that I definitely shouldn’t have.
Things I Would Tell Myself When Starting Out
- Don’t give yourself a short move-in window. I had a literal weekend between ending my Microsoft internship and starting my PhD. This is not college. There is no bed waiting for you, or wifi and electricity setup. You will end up sleeping on an air mattress for six weeks and desperately trying to setup a Google Fiber appointment.
- Be super clear with everything you’re working on, and double your time estimates when you talk to your advisor about project milestones. It took me a while to realize that not hearing from me in-between meetings and missing milestones was more stressful to my advisor than just being upfront about setting realistic timelines. I still struggle with the last one–it’s hard admitting you need a slower pace in a fast field, tbh. But I’ve gotten more consistent with sending at least a small update every day or two. I was worried I’d get in trouble if my update boiled down to “there’s bugs everywhere and I’m really struggling”, but as my labmate wisely said “sometimes you just have to send them your error messages”.
- Set boundaries! I wanted so so desperately to be liked my first few weeks and to not feel like a little alien anymore that I said yes to everything. Any coffee chat, lunch, meetup, talk, practice talk, walk around Tech Square. And that part was good. I think I figured out how to make friends across cultural, age, background etc. because of that. But then I got into the habit of being always up for anything and had trouble saying “Sorry I gotta focus right now”. So be very social! and then chill out and set some focus blocks.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for lots of help and ask lots of clarifying questions. I was so worried about looking stupid that I would try to figure everything out myself. Lean into technical discussions where it feels like suddenly your project is silly and your progress is meager and your knowledge is spotty. It took me forever to find out that’s normal. And I missed out on a lot of good feedback and tried-and-tested knowledge because I was too scared to admit I was nervous. To quote another labmate, sometimes you’ve got to be brave and say you didn’t figure it out.
- SLEEP. I really didn’t want to disappoint anyone and so I would pull all-nighters just to have 4 graphs ready by a check-in meeting. Results might be worth your sleep sometimes, but not all the time. This one I’m still working on tbh. I pulled more all-nighters this semester than in all of undergrad combined.
- Procrastination is an anxiety response, so sometimes you have to break it down into little chunks. Sometimes I’d get a target for the next week’s meeting that involved tools I didn’t know how to even START learning. And then I’d lose precious time worried about failing instead of just. . .trying a little something something. It’s fine to be nervous but just start off with a little chunk. Write 5 lines, do the cookbook exercise, you just gotta get started and then it isn’t so daunting anymore.
- Enjoy the little things. It’s really easy to absorb everyone’s stress. Especially when it’s stress about your progress or some unexpected results in your project. Remember you can only put in your most honest effort, and beyond that other people’s stress isn’t your responsibility to carry. Remember all the little joys–code that runs after 12 hours of debugging. Getting instant access to a GPU on the university cluster. Reading a paper that’s spectacularly written and dreaming about being able to write like that someday. Laughin with a friend. Drinking coffee and watching the sunrise from the binary bridge after your all-nighter yielded results. Dancing with your labmates at a bougie spanish restaurant (their PI has impeccable taste). Celebrating graduations. Watching Rocky Aur Rani with your grad school friends and realizing you’ve found your place. Listening to your advisor tell stories about his grad school days and remembering he probably was nervous once too.
- It doesn’t always feel okay. But it always ends up okay.