1) Happiness is rare, cherish it while you can.
- Sounds dramatic ? Try living through the ups and downs ( usually downs) of missing deadlines, paper rejections, getting your ego crushed, watch your peers pass out etc etc.
2) 'Guide'liness is next to Godliness.
- For those of us who are atheists, as if the world fights back in revealing a new power in the form of a middle aged man/woman, who has the power to affect your life on everyday basis. For others who already believe in almighty find themselves showing intense partiality in devotion to this new source of power.
3) Money is rare too, cherish it, while it lasts.
- Living on meagre Research Assistantships ( as if calling it an RA is supposed to make it sound honourable ), rarely lasts when the month is coming to an end. Hence the sheer desperation of living within the means turns out to be a pattern in extravagances in the former days of the month and penurious in later half.
4) All thesis topics are either too aimbitious or taken.
5) You are an insignificant drop in the ocean.
- And you thought, you didnt want to be just one among the thousands of IT engineers, clunking away the keyboards in their cubicles ? Well here you find, there is another kind of ocean, reseachers in almost completely saturated domains, where you still end up being an insignificant researcher , with the exception of course, some of the brightest or luckiest kinds.
6) Almost all research end up at the blind alleys of open problems.
- From wherever you start, you have to given in to an outstanding open problem in that domain. It would be either intractable or NP-hard. Hence you end up using patchy solutions that have been already in use, indicating to the fact, that till these open problems are tackled, there is not much one can do.
7) I cannot be an island.
- One never really realises the importance of friends (in some rare cases, family), when one is facing the frustuation of research. I remember one faculty say once - " Research is a very lonely experience", and i cant agree more.
P.S : Usually i am not this pessimistic, and i hate this side of me. I still like research.
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2 comments:
lol! Awesome post. The fifth one is most disheartening but is the best of the lot, can't agree more with you. I can add some more:
1. never postpone anything that you enjoy for your research work. If you do, you are a fool. Odds are, you would not have done any work, you would feel guilty for not going and ultimately end up watching a movie on ur PC.
2. Getting good at fake smiles [expanding more on this can lead to trouble :P]
3. If you keep both a research paper and wikipedia open, chances are that you might exhaust wiki articles but never complete the paper.
4. Even you don't understand the math you wrote in your research paper.
5. A good graph is just a photoshop away.
6. If you are not good at research, try atleast become good at philosophy- preaching why everything is just a waste and has no meaning.
@ karthik: Damn ! You should have written this one ! Would have done better justice to it :).
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