
Lessons learned the hard way in grad school (so far) - andreyk
https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/life/lessons-learned-from-failures/#
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russfink
Love this. If I had one to add, don't be afraid to go back to a previous idea
with a fresh perspective. I spent several months researching a similarity
technique. After making no headway, and realizing that a "crutch" was doing
all the work, I dropped the first idea to pursue the crutch exclusively. After
many more months, I realized that crutch would not work after all, and was
depressed. But then I had a different idea about the original technique. I
went back to that, applied the new twist, and eureka!

It is like those old coyote road runner cartoons. The frustrating thing about
the coyote was that he never went back and fixed tiny problems with his
attempts, instead he dropped every nearly-successful attempt and moved on to
something completely different, just to find that it had different bugs in it.

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blaser-waffle
> It is like those old coyote road runner cartoons. The frustrating thing
> about the coyote was that he never went back and fixed tiny problems with
> his attempts, instead he dropped every nearly-successful attempt and moved
> on to something completely different, just to find that it had different
> bugs in it.

I've heard the same thing about GI Joe. COBRA had working weather satellites
---why didn't they just try again in next weeks episode?!

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andreyk
Author here, hope you enjoy! Feel free to ask anything too or suggest
revisions.

Disclaimer up front, as I say in the text these are not the only lessons I
have learned, just the most directly linked to experiences I can use as
examples. And, these are of course applicable to most creative work, not just
grad school.

PS there was a pretty lengthy discussion on the /r/ML subreddit already, which
you might find interesting
([https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/fsi7iv/d_l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/fsi7iv/d_lessons_learned_from_my_failures_as_a_grad/))

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librish
Has your answer to the question "would you recommend going for a PhD?" changed
since you started?

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andreyk
Nope! As I said in there, this is inherently in the nature of doing a PhD, and
having done research in undergrad and MS I knew that going on. May not make it
easier to go through tough stuff, but it does make it easier to not lose
desire to do PhD.

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kaybe
You write 'fellowship rejected' 3 times, I read 'managed to apply for 3
fellowships'. Just like you did with the paper submissions I think these can
also count as successes.

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andreyk
Indeed!

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mikekchar
The biggest mistake I had in grad school (which I didn't survive) was to talk
to other people in the department. I was building a parallel discrete even
simulator (using an optimistic strategy with rollback). There were a couple of
people in the department doing work that needed simulation. I naively went
around to them and showed them what I was doing and asked them if there was
anything they might find useful. I had read up on the research of the other
people in the group, looked at what they were doing and the simulation side
was decidedly... um... not robust, shall we say. I identified a bunch of
issues that they were certainly having and showed how what I was doing would
help them out.

OMG. What a shit storm that caused. My supervisor was thankfully very good
about it (I had not cleared my wonderful idea with him). But after a few
months of being accused of being a spy and people being cautioned not to talk
to me under any circumstances, I decided that industry was the way forward for
me. I realised I was not suited for the cut-throat nature of academic life ;-)

I say this knowing that some people will be shocked, but that anybody in
academia will be mostly shocked at my naivety. Seriously bad idea, but one
that idealistic, younger me thought was natural.

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alimw
A spy for whom?

~~~
mikekchar
Other professors were convinced I was trying to steal their ideas and give
them to my supervisor. It caused him a lot of trouble.

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gautamcgoel
Went to college with this guy, great to see him kicking ass on the front page
of HN!

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abidlabs
Good stuff Andrey! Sounds very familiar :)

