It's been one year and three-ish months since my return to academia as a Ph.D. student at Michigan! From the time I moved out of Bengaluru, I've had this mix of pressure and expectation built up on how I would fare in this world that I know is going to be filled with huge ups and downs, a lot of excitement and pressure and most importantly, a lot of clashing of adapting to something new and moving on from the nostalgia of something old. I hope it gives you an insight into thoughts and expectations of what it means to be a first-year PhD student now :).

Courses

I was skeptical of how courses would go because I was not very disciplined during my undergrad and was afraid I'd repeat the same this time. Thankfully, I'm more mature now (only slightly) and understand myself better when scheduling things, knowing the gap between my ideal plan and what I end up doing (I'm not the best person in time allocation). There is not much to say other than this, but I have maintained a 4.0  because I wanted to prove that I can support a good GPA while meeting my other goals.

Research

What to work on: Unsurprisingly, I've been part of many discussions, brainstorming, and projects since my advisor and I (duh) were starting afresh. This is something I expected and was mentally prepared for. My advisor pointed me towards problems we could work on with a wide lens that fit the application in social good contexts while focusing on Human-Centered AI. Although I consider myself pretty flexible in terms of interests, I had a list of topics I wanted to work on, but as I dug deep, I slowly realized that other things require my efforts first, and after laying those foundations, I can move onto my next set of ideas. Back to the mindset of having a wide-scoped lens, I was ecstatic that we would explore with a high \epsilon value.

Publishing a paper: While I did not put too much pressure on myself, I certainly wanted to end my first year with one accepted publication to boost my self-confidence and feel capable of leading research problems individually. Thankfully, the stars did align, and CHAIR was accepted (as a workshop paper at CVPR and a full paper at IJCAI). I got to present this work at two poster sessions and give a talk at IJCAI, which felt really good because I've always thought that I've lost the touch of giving talks and generally speaking to more than three people (I used to do a lot of public speaking while I was in middle and high school and have barely done anything close ever since).

Candidacy: CSE UMich rules dictate that PhD students must present their research in an hour and a half session before the end of their second year to be candidates (this includes finishing courses). Luckily, I did pass it :). However, the effort behind this was giving many practice talks to many people and a couple of plushies on my sofa as my audience every night before the talk. More on this later...

Conferences and Travel

Luckily, I've been to three conferences during this time - NeurIPS, CVPR, and IJCAI, with posters at all three and a talk at the last one in Jeju, South Korea. The attendance of NeurIPS and CVPR was 12,000! One of the best moments in both these conferences was meeting so many people whose work I've admired and respected. Contrary to a lot of networking advice for PhD students, which focuses on productive meetings at conferences, meeting the greats means a lot, especially coming from a country where accessibility to outstanding scientists only happens at top institutions and with a lot of reluctance. I've made some good friends at these conferences, built the confidence to approach strangers, and, most importantly, really complimented people whose work I've been reading.

I look forward to meeting more cool people and making good friends at these conferences; it is somewhat concerning to me that I have to do a lot of homework and preparation so that these conferences are productive, or else I will waste a lot of time and effort trying to find relevant work.

Skills

Talks: I've realized I don't have the natural confidence or ability to give a good talk (which I imagine is the case with most people). But good news—I realized that soon. I've been told that the PhD time is when these things can be worked upon :), so I've been trying to do so for the past few months. Before all my talks, I made sure to practice my talks at least half a dozen times so that I would be fully aware of my slides. I have come up with metrics that measure how confident I am about the talk. Movement around the talk space * ( 1/Number of times I've looked behind me to see the slide) is an excellent metric to maximize my confidence in giving that talk. I also scored the highest in my Advanced Data Mining class for presenting the assigned paper. It's not much, but that's a win for me. I've also been told that my Computing in Society talk aimed at freshmen and sophomores was well received, so it was not bad all in all.

Writing: I haven't entirely been happy with this. I vowed to be regular with my blogs at the start of my PhD, but that hasn't been the case. I'm hoping blogging can be regular starting next semester because I will hopefully finish my courses.

Confidence: I don't think I was completely confident about handling all the facets of being able to do a PhD, but I'm starting to turn that narrative around. I've started to compare myself with others less than before (easier said than done when every signal from everyone around - peers, internship, etc. is based on comparisons).

Hacking: Placed 2nd in the Google x MHacks with so many caffeinated undergrads. I'm now a twice winner - including one while I was at MSR. I was happy with the idea and execution - I learned how to build a VSCode extension!

Personal Wins

I'm glad I have traveled more than I did in the past two years in India. I've visited three continents (and countries) and eight cities. All the travel has made me an efficient packer and better at planning travel, which is very handy when attending conferences when the schedule is so tight. I also played guitar for a hundred people for the first time, which has been on my bucket list for so long, and I think I did well. (Side note: I highly recommend every PhD student to have an instrument with which you can unwind)

What am I looking forward to

More cool research, obviously (read in Snape's voice). But hopefully, impactful research and focus on improving my communication skills (scientific and general purpose). While I want to say I'd like to reduce comparing myself to others, it's a hard promise to keep, so I'll try. If you know how to do that effectively, please email me. I'm planning to write these reflections every six months or so, so I'll keep you updated on whether they've reduced (I promise I'll be honest)