Reflecting On Early Work
Reflecting On Early Work
The first draft is always going to be the worst
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
It’s been a while. I’ve hidden a few progress posts on a side section because they were more about how PhD life, rather than teaching statistical concepts. I didn’t want to flood my friends’ inboxes on personal woes.
Thinking about that made me take a step back, so I decided to write for the main section again.What’s happened since June?
A First Brush With Rejection
When I first came to UCSD, I started on a project that ended up lasting through my first two years in the program. It was initially created to give me a new model to learn, but it ended up evolving into two talks and a submitted manuscript.
This sounds productive at first, but to be frank, I was and am still not proud of the work. I remember feeling this wave of relief when the paper was finally submitted. I didn’t have to work on the paper anymore. I didn’t have to stare at the code I threw together.
Why am I not proud of my work? Much of it stems from feeling like I don’t truly have a deep enough grasp of the main idea of the paper. A lot of effort for this paper came when I didn’t have the time or bandwidth to give the research the attention it deserved. A lot of this shame also comes from a mental reflex: “I’m going to be found out sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time before everyone realizes my work is bullshit”.
Imagine my deflation when I get this in the email:
Rejection isn’t new to me, but the fact that I would have to stare at this project to me was soul-crushing. Honestly, I was actually a little sour that the paper was rejected because I’m just like that, but it felt weird to think that while feeling my work wasn’t great in the first place.
Cognitive dissonance aside, after giving myself some time to process the rejection, I think there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
The Student-Researcher Transition
What changed? Spring and summer happened, and I needed to find a new project. Instead of having the project assigned to me by my advisor, this new one would need to be something that I seek out myself. I’m thinking retrospectively here, but I really feel that this is where the difference stems.
Finding a research problem turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. Finding a research problem means reading lots and lots of papers to make sure that the problem I choose isn’t solved already. In spring, reading these papers was outright frustrating. Do I read the whole paper? What should I learn from the paper? There’s an art to reading research manuscripts, and it’s just a reality that it takes time to learn how to approach them. This was my Spring Quarter lesson.
In the summer time, I finally settled on a research problem that I felt like I could study without losing my mind: N-of-1 trials. I eventually found inspiration for a new project and I’ve learned to chip away at it. This project deserves its own post, but the point here is that I’ve learned a lot from finding a problem on my own. I’m less a student now and more a researcher-in-training.
Salvaging
I received that rejection just a few weeks ago. After attending my pity party, I thought about where to go from there. At first, I genuinely didn’t want to do anything for the project. I wanted to dump it in whatever journal would take it as is. I didn’t want to do anymore work for it.
Until I gave it some thought.
I think I’m a different researcher after going through this spring and summer. If there’s something I don’t know, I now have a better approach for figuring out than when I first made this rejected paper. Rather than approach this as a “cut my losses” experience, I’ll put an honest effort to addressing the criticisms from the reviewers and try to get the paper into a more serious journal. It helps a lot that there’s so much time now for a 3rd year PhD student who has no course obligations.
I always had this perspective that I had separated myself from impostor syndrome, but thinking about that email rejection made me step back.
It’s good to be back.