(Written at end of summer 2023 – last semester of 2nd-year PhD)
Milestone: I had just passed my candidacy exam last month. It’s probably a good time to document some self-reflections after going through the ups and downs in this two-year doctorate journey.
I am fortunate to have Steve as my advisor. I particularly appreciate his (1) weekly one-on-one meetings on top of lab group meeting, (2) occasional casual coffee chats to bounce off research ideas and opinions about the state of AI, (3) being supportive of students’ exploration of research interests while giving both high-level and low-level, technical and general, feedback, and (4) being flexible, responsive, and trying his best to alleviate the stress off his students.
Knowing I have his full support enables me to take ownership of my research career. While Steve has not worked on multilingual projects before, it makes me feel priviledged and grateful that he is open and supportive of my research interests in the coming years of PhD. In fact, through him, I was introduced to the BigScience community and met many fantastic and passionate collaborators, which eventually led to some projects/initiatives I’m proud of, such as BLOOM+1 and starting a grassroot research group for Southeast Asian languages.
I am a huge fan of open-source collaborative research. To me, the upsides significantly outweigh the downsides. Collaborative work invites diversity of perspectives and communication of findings across multiple fields, which often generates exciting project ideas and keeps me abreast of the latest NLP development.
Scaling from a two-person project to 10+ people project required me to develop a different type of project leadership, especially on how to best manage resources, such as allocating human/compute resources and large-scale experimental tracking. Most importantly, I’ve improved my communication skills and overcome Imposter’s syndrome as I had to listen to various feedback and ultimately decide on the project direction.
One word I’d use to describe the research culture here at Brown is chill. I don’t feel the external pressure to prioritize the quantity of publications. Such a non-competitive research environment offers me the opportunity to engage with research in a healthier manner, where I get involved in different projects because they are intellectually stimulating (internal motivation) instead of the constant “publish or perish” reminder (external motivation). It also allows me grow in different dimensions instead of solely optimizing the publication metrics.
Brown also promotes a collaborative research culture. For instance, we have a Superlab collaborative research group involving Steve’s, Ellie’s and Chen’s students, where we meet every two weeks to get feedback on projects or conference abstract submissions. Another notable group is BigAI for robotics research endeavors.
I enjoy working on multiple things simultaneously, as I am intellectually stimulated by diverse topics and potential opportunities. Therefore, I often run into the issue of taking up too many responsibilities. In fact, I experienced burntout in my first year of PhD, and it took me several months to recover my level of productivity.
Since then, I’ve learned to say no and become more self-aware of my manageable stress level, including noticing signs of imminent burnout (e.g., self-sabotaging behaviors or a reinforcing feedback loop of procrastination). I’ve also become more aware of the antagonistic combination of projects; for instance, no two engineering-heavy first-authored projects at the same time.
Aside from self-awareness, it helps me a lot to have close and supportive friends as well as develop simple self-care routines when there are a lot of deadlines. I also find it necessary for me to have passions outside of work–––activities like social dancing would instantly lift my mood during the low days.
I’ve worked on a project for more than a year (to be exact, 16 months) that I had to move on because our efforts were futile despite how straightforward and seemingly feasible the idea was. It was a difficult decision because of sunk cost and the possibility of it working out if we stuck to the problem longer. In the end, we exhausted all possible hypotheses about the obstacle and pulled the plug on the project.
Project success being a non-linear factor has made me rethink the right attitude to approach research. My aforementioned experience has taught me how to properly design simple experiments to quickly confirm the feasibility of an idea and how to set up good baselines. Instead of being overzealous on jumping into a problem, I now spend more time sharpening the problem and understanding the tension–––simply put, contradictory theoretical or empirical findings on a problem–––such that I can properly test the hypothesis and derive interesting insights from either positive or negative experimental outcomes.