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progress: freak out and make things
Jun. 3rd, 2013 02:47 pmI think we can actually make this PhD thing work.
I've had some low, grumpy moments (understatement), but in April and May, I went from zero things published with my advisor to two! We put in a paper for the SemEval shared task on cross-lingual word-sense disambiguation, having done pretty well on the task. And then, with remarkable velocity, I put together a mostly different CL-WSD system and we put in a paper for the HyTra hybrid translation workshop! And they accepted it!
Those were both welcome developments, and did a lot for my confidence, but they honestly weren't surprising. These aren't super-huge deals, as venues go -- it's not like I got a paper at ACL proper.
What I had wanted to do for a long time -- but was dreading -- was asking John D, one of the guys from GResearch/GTranslate, to be an external member on my dissertation committee. He wasn't my official mentor for either summer, but he was always happy to bounce ideas around with the interns, and so friendly and welcoming! And he cares a lot about education -- he's doing work with the Google education-outreach people, and he sometimes teaches classes [0] at Berkeley. I have a role model. Or at least one to aspire to.
Eventually I worked up the gumption to ask him if he'd be on my committee -- and he said he'd be happy to do it! Holy cow. Now I have to flip the heck out and learn everything and write all the programs and translate all the languages and never sleep again until I can punch through brick walls and see five seconds into the future. You don't know how much of a vote of confidence that was for me. And now I have to be good enough to warrant that confidence.
So next week I'll be in Atlanta for NAACL to present at SemEval. Going to take a quick detour to Tallahassee first.
And I guess I'm going to Sofia, Bulgaria in August for ACL (where I'll present at the HyTra workshop)... gotta plan that up soon too.
[0] I helped him build some class materials and a testing framework in Logo for his 2011 iteration of Intro CS at Berkeley. If you ever hear me claim that I've been paid money, by Google, to write Logo, this is what I'm talking about.
I've had some low, grumpy moments (understatement), but in April and May, I went from zero things published with my advisor to two! We put in a paper for the SemEval shared task on cross-lingual word-sense disambiguation, having done pretty well on the task. And then, with remarkable velocity, I put together a mostly different CL-WSD system and we put in a paper for the HyTra hybrid translation workshop! And they accepted it!
Those were both welcome developments, and did a lot for my confidence, but they honestly weren't surprising. These aren't super-huge deals, as venues go -- it's not like I got a paper at ACL proper.
What I had wanted to do for a long time -- but was dreading -- was asking John D, one of the guys from GResearch/GTranslate, to be an external member on my dissertation committee. He wasn't my official mentor for either summer, but he was always happy to bounce ideas around with the interns, and so friendly and welcoming! And he cares a lot about education -- he's doing work with the Google education-outreach people, and he sometimes teaches classes [0] at Berkeley. I have a role model. Or at least one to aspire to.
Eventually I worked up the gumption to ask him if he'd be on my committee -- and he said he'd be happy to do it! Holy cow. Now I have to flip the heck out and learn everything and write all the programs and translate all the languages and never sleep again until I can punch through brick walls and see five seconds into the future. You don't know how much of a vote of confidence that was for me. And now I have to be good enough to warrant that confidence.
So next week I'll be in Atlanta for NAACL to present at SemEval. Going to take a quick detour to Tallahassee first.
And I guess I'm going to Sofia, Bulgaria in August for ACL (where I'll present at the HyTra workshop)... gotta plan that up soon too.
[0] I helped him build some class materials and a testing framework in Logo for his 2011 iteration of Intro CS at Berkeley. If you ever hear me claim that I've been paid money, by Google, to write Logo, this is what I'm talking about.
