A PhD's life

Well, it's been a long long time since I last put something on my blog. It's not that I did not write anything, I wrote a lot indeed, those include:

- 2 papers [1] (1 conference [2], 1 journal [3])
- The first chapter of a long story (I will post it here soon )

Last week, I suffered a bad flu which made me keep coughing for the whole week. I took tons of pills, originated from all around the world: Vietnamese, Chinese, European... and now I feel better

I wanted to write something about PhD life (it was about mine, but it is quite generally applicable to others), but I tried to wait until I have a better feeling about it. I just don't want my entry to be too bitter

Now, PhD life:

Before I started my PhD, I thought it's about
- Working with some other (smart) people to get something new and novel
- Satisfying my desire of learning and researching
- Using my programming skill and so on, to get some thing done
and most importantly, I dreamed about inventing something decent so that people in the industry would use it

After 2 years, I have learned all the below facts:
- PhD is all about writing papers (and even after graduating, you will still have to write papers, to be able to survive in the academic environment, or no university will hire you)
- Programming (and all the logistics skill) doesn't help. We can get some undergraduates do it for us.
- Most of the papers are crappy: you get someone's (nonsense) work, try to improve it to some better degree of nonsense, then publish it.

There were more than one time when I thought I would not make it.
There were more than one time when I felt regret about my choice.
There were more than one time when I said that I was wasting my time here, and that I could have done better outside.

But until now I am still walking on the road. And I am no longer thinking of leaving.

PhD is about testing your patience: are you able to do useless thing continuously for 3 or 4 years , under high pressure from school (your scholarship )?

Every night, you may fall into a deep sadness before going to bed, but the next morning, be ready to cheer yourself up.

Last but not least, when people keep talking about successful and famous 8x 9x guys who have earned millions of $$$, who have traveled all around the world. Don't be sad and change your mind. We, PhDs, are in a different system, where papers are our $$$, the lab is our world.

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[1] paper: unit to measure a one's ability on researching, like meter / kilometer to measure the length. It also means "some pages of writing about your (hopefully) new ideas/work".
[2] conference: like a meeting, you may submit your paper to a conference, if it is accepted, you can go there and talk talk talk.
[3] journal: like a magazine, you submit your paper to a journal, they read it and return to you after 6 months with their comments such as "your work is great, but not good enough to be in our journal" or "we found that you have done quite a good work, but you seem to be not aware of other work in the same area such as [.... their works here .... ]". All you have to do is to add their work in the reference part, and reply to them: "we would like to thank the reviewer, you helped us to enrich our paper. We have modify our paper according to your comments ..." . The process repeat itself until some years later, when they are fed up with you, they will accept it: "Congratulations, your article has been accepted and it will appear in the next 2 years' issue".