November 22, 2021

What's Research Like? (1/4)

It’s nearing the almost three-month mark of me actually ¹ doing research. If I target late August 2022 or sometime in September 2022 as my “finish” date, I’m actually about a quarter of the way through. That said, people in grad school rarely finish on time, so who knows? I might be here until the day I die.

I think it would be pretty cool to see how my perception of research changes throughout my (short) time doing full-time research, so I’ll probably aim to write one of these every three months or so.

What did I think this “research” thing was going to be like?

In hindsight, I think modern media has done a pretty poor job in portraying science and research. If you’ve seen The Imitation Game (2014), you know how Alan Turing, portrayed by renowned actor Wimbledon Tennismatch ² had a eureka moment and immediately broke the code to the Enigma machine. In The Theory of Everything (2014), Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne, goes to a single lecture and comes up with the basis for black holes (or something to that effect, it’s been a long time since I watched that film). I’m not sure how accurate these portrayals of scientific breakthroughs are, but I have to assume that a lot of it is embellished to make it palatable for a general audience in under a few hours. Watching a bunch of graduate students and researchers just sitting around would get pretty old.

I think I fell victim to thinking that I too, would have a eureka moment (although not one of the same magnitude portrayed in films). A moment where I would finally realize what my research or my thesis would really be about. I haven’t had this moment in the past few months, and I honestly think it’s not something that actually happens to most people.

What’s research really like (at least for now)

Honestly, it’s a lot of sitting around and reading. I wish I could say it’s more exciting than that, but the most exciting parts of my day are probably when I make coffee and when I have lunch with some of my lab members. I meet with my advisor once a week, and during these meetings, we usually chat about what I did since the last time we spoke. These meetings are probably the most helpful part of my week, since it’s effectively a litmus test for whether I’m on track or not. I mainly take this time to propose what I’m going to do for the next week, and ask for Gail’s opinion on whether it seems like a good idea or not.

I think I got pretty lucky in the sense that I was able to hone in on a topic that I was interested in. I heard horror stories about a lot of students taking half their entire degree to find a topic (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but I’d like to finish within a specific time frame), and I was slightly concerned as Gail was an advisor known to be pretty hands-off in terms of topic selection. I’d like to think I’m a pretty independent person, but I had some reservations about being totally independent with my research, since it’s something I have very little experience with. That said, my immediate research group has been incredibly supportive, and I really can’t ask for a better supervisor than Gail. I really hope my thoughts on this matter don’t change in the next few months.

In terms of how my thesis is going, I finally submitted my BREB ³ for the survey on software development questions that will likely shape the general direction of my thesis. I think if we get approval before the 30th of this month, we’ll be able to deploy it sometime in December. We’ve also been chatting with someone from JetBrains research, and hopefully that’ll give us an opportunity to prototype the tool and get feedback from actual developers.

Non-research things

They released a remake of Pokemon Diamond (named Pokemon Brilliant Diamond) last Friday. I bought the game cartridge and have been playing it for the past few days. I definitely remember playing Pokemon Diamond, but it’s been so long that I can’t remember any specifics about this game. I’ll be co-presenting a paper with Arthur tomorrow at the joint software engineering reading group (SERG) with some folks from the University of Washington, so part of my day was spent making some slides.

That’s it for now, see you next week!