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editor's note: this is entry #1337
Last week, I was feeling awful, like flop-on-the-floor-and-whimper awful, about the future of my gradschool situation. The summer's coming to an end, and I was going to have to go back and face school, where my notional research group doesn't do anything together, especially not sit and work in the same room, or collaborate, or have lunch. Where my advisor just retired and moved to the west coast, and we haven't written any papers together in three years, but supposedly we're still going to work together Real Soon Now. Where I'm going to teach a class on NLP to undergrads, but the department can't seem to get its shit together enough to tell me what I'm supposed to know as an instructor (are there guidelines, or even laws, about teaching a class? how do I enter grades?), or whether I get a TA to help with all of this...
... and to top it all off, I looked to the future, and I saw n more years of sitting in a windowless basement, alone dissertating on some permanently unfunded low-resource language rule-based translation thing that nobody would care about, only emerging to teach classes here and again, so I can keep buying cat food for my little guys. Until I'm finally granted a consolation PhD in "working on things by yourself, out of context", and can leave.
Not all of my problems are fixed.
But Mike came to visit Google last week, and we had a good long conversation. And he had a really good, concrete suggestion. Two of them, actually. But the first one is like Gordian Knot-quality problem solving, and I felt immediately better after he suggested it: don't sit in the underground office in Informatics where you're assigned to sit (this is where Mike's official lab space has been allocated) -- sit in the Linguistics building public lab, where people go occasionally. I had been weirdly fixated on trying to get the space allocated so that the Linguistics students (or somebody, maybe even Mike's other (feckless) students) would sit with me. Too complicated. I'll just go to their sometimes-used public lab space, and they'll learn that it's worth it to do more work in there, because when they do, they have productive conversations with me!
Mike's other suggestion: just be unemployed, at least sometimes. I'm making a lot of money this summer; why burn time on being a TA later, when I could just do work instead? Maybe I'll be "on leave" in the Spring. I'll just do research instead of signing up for "research credits" and having to TA!
Also I got the TA I wanted for my class! I was pretty sure the department would screw everything up and not give me a TA at all. But this worked out. She's a second-year CS phd student, and she wants to do NLP too... so she's going to have basically all of the same problems that I've been having, unless we can get a better group dynamic going. We can probably camp the Linguistics lab space together. I think this is going to work out pretty well.
So: no longer despondent. Cautiously... hopeful?
alert readers will note that my phd advisor seems to have suggested that I (a) don't do work in his lab space, and (b) be unemployed.
Last week, I was feeling awful, like flop-on-the-floor-and-whimper awful, about the future of my gradschool situation. The summer's coming to an end, and I was going to have to go back and face school, where my notional research group doesn't do anything together, especially not sit and work in the same room, or collaborate, or have lunch. Where my advisor just retired and moved to the west coast, and we haven't written any papers together in three years, but supposedly we're still going to work together Real Soon Now. Where I'm going to teach a class on NLP to undergrads, but the department can't seem to get its shit together enough to tell me what I'm supposed to know as an instructor (are there guidelines, or even laws, about teaching a class? how do I enter grades?), or whether I get a TA to help with all of this...
... and to top it all off, I looked to the future, and I saw n more years of sitting in a windowless basement, alone dissertating on some permanently unfunded low-resource language rule-based translation thing that nobody would care about, only emerging to teach classes here and again, so I can keep buying cat food for my little guys. Until I'm finally granted a consolation PhD in "working on things by yourself, out of context", and can leave.
Not all of my problems are fixed.
But Mike came to visit Google last week, and we had a good long conversation. And he had a really good, concrete suggestion. Two of them, actually. But the first one is like Gordian Knot-quality problem solving, and I felt immediately better after he suggested it: don't sit in the underground office in Informatics where you're assigned to sit (this is where Mike's official lab space has been allocated) -- sit in the Linguistics building public lab, where people go occasionally. I had been weirdly fixated on trying to get the space allocated so that the Linguistics students (or somebody, maybe even Mike's other (feckless) students) would sit with me. Too complicated. I'll just go to their sometimes-used public lab space, and they'll learn that it's worth it to do more work in there, because when they do, they have productive conversations with me!
Mike's other suggestion: just be unemployed, at least sometimes. I'm making a lot of money this summer; why burn time on being a TA later, when I could just do work instead? Maybe I'll be "on leave" in the Spring. I'll just do research instead of signing up for "research credits" and having to TA!
Also I got the TA I wanted for my class! I was pretty sure the department would screw everything up and not give me a TA at all. But this worked out. She's a second-year CS phd student, and she wants to do NLP too... so she's going to have basically all of the same problems that I've been having, unless we can get a better group dynamic going. We can probably camp the Linguistics lab space together. I think this is going to work out pretty well.
So: no longer despondent. Cautiously... hopeful?
alert readers will note that my phd advisor seems to have suggested that I (a) don't do work in his lab space, and (b) be unemployed.
