It’s been about 5 months since I moved back to San Francisco. So I thought it would be a good time to post an update about everything new and wonderful I’ve experienced in the city so far.
I wrote about it on my substack: https://t.co/OJ5u4lYgba
making slides using powerpoint and realizing how deliberately difficult and non-intuitive it is to insert animations etc that it's somehow a lot easier to vibe code my own powerpoint equivalent.
Lot of discourse on work-life balance during PhD - sure there’s an element of dedicating complete devotion to the topic of research, in fact for the main theoretical result from my first NeurIPS paper, I spent about a week thinking about the proof constantly before I had my Eureka moment.
Having said that - it’s not a necessary condition for breakthrough research. With time you develop sufficient creative muscle, intuition and pattern recognition that allows you to derive insights without as much effort.
Also there are negative consequences of over indexing on work/PhD - which is that inevitably, you will encounter a time where your research doesn’t translate into the results you want and which in many cases translates to anxiety and depression that basically takes away from your scientific creativity and productivity.
I don’t agree. A PhD student should not prioritize work-life balance.
Getting to do a PhD is a privilege. You are paid to think. There is no pressure for you to be economically useful. It is a unique opportunity to push the boundaries of human knowledge and produce something ground breaking.
And nothing great ever happens without complete devotion. Look at everything that moved and shaped the world. Every single person who created anything meaningful, in science, in arts, in music, in movies, devoted their lives to their craft.
Extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary inputs and some degree of sacrifice. Sure, have work-life balance during your PhD. But be content a mediocre outcome.
top 10 annoying things that can happen on a wednesday is having to sit through a meeting with video on and pretending to show interest cause your skip skip manager is on the call and i can almost see myself sub this for the sound of nails grating on a chalkboard