My first challenge

This is 13th Oct, about a week after my breakup, and first day of my undertaking of my first challenge.

So as I have discussed in front, I decided to do one challenge per period of time. Once I finish a challenge, I will move on to the next one.

The first challenge is actually writing something and posting it online everyday for two months. Turns out the second challenge is also a rather solidary experience, in that I will be reading 10 books in however long it takes.

I borrowed three books on Plato the other day in the library, so guys I will talk about them one day in these two months.

Each day, the theme will be slightly different. Today, I will talk about science. It is about the journey of a student, and my tips for surviving these many years of education, and what it means to be doing science, in particular working on my area of research.

Why do people do science, why is it that there are so many of us working around the clock, sometimes racing against one another, hoping to come up with some ideas that will work? How important is intelligence in this field? How do you explain your research to others? How do you learn and grow as a researcher? How did you learn to become a scientist? What are some skills that you picked up in graduate school that are invaluable to your future career? How do you balance personal life with work life? How do you eat healthily and maintain a good workout habit while so many things are going on. And research is so hard. This is especially so the more theoretical your work gets. There are so many people working on it, and you wonder if you are ever good enough to be a game changer in the field.

As a first year PhD student, my dream is so simple. I didn’t have big dreams. I didn’t think I am especially smart. But what I really want is to be a team player. I want to do research as part of a team and work with others who are also interested in some challenging, slightly mathematical topic. That is what I want.

For the whole of my second year, I was mostly working solo on my own project. It gets painful sometimes, not knowing where it will end up, and not knowing if I will make enough progress to impress my advisor and my peers. I am always struggling somehow. I feel that I don’t know enough physics or math to understand half the things I was reading. There are tons of papers in the field, and i have no idea what was relevant to my research and what wasn’t. Everyday felt like me roaming around not exactly knowing what to do. Each week, I would try something, but 80% of the time it would not end up anywhere.

So why would people do research? When it is so hard, so mindblowingly hard. I already have so much trouble socializing and making friends. I tried to maintain a positive aura around me because I knew it would work as a charm, but often i felt the real me was this moody, introspective me who retreat back to a cave and meditate on life, work and a journey long of failures, and wishing to forget the fear and anxiety that often creep back into my mind.

I wonder if by taking up a challenge as hard as PhD, something about me will change? I wonder if I could do this and make it through? I wonder if I could form real friendship through intellectual discourses? But to be honest, I have no idea how to discuss with others about work. More often than not, I find myself seemingly not knowing anything.

So research is hard. It is hard to the point that not many survive. and yet fewer will make it through to the top of their academic career. I am going to be working on writing my paper now.

Thanks for reading this first post.

Hopefully I will write something more positive tomorrow.