Saturday 14 April 2018

Where are the research "YESSS" moments?

Hi everyone,

One more month of project and one less to finish the PhD. What a stress!

Currently finishing the final piece of research work to start the worst nightmare of every PhD, writing :) Well, I already started ...let's be honest...otherwise I would be in trouble (and maybe I 'm already in trouble)...
This must be a thing of age, but 3 years sure go fast.

Well, I am still preparing to go to one of my last conferences (yes, crazy to still consider conferences, but these are progressively more important) and a couple of "extra things".

Today I'll spend some time to talk about one of the lessons I learned during all this time working with statistics and probabilistic models (or maybe this comment extends to research in general) .
This week I was thinking... this thing of the "getting up the chair and screaming YES!!!" moment must be a myth... Why?

Mainly because a real contribution comes from many almost YES moments :) its just that these years made me learn that it is not recommended to "celebrate" too soon heheh
You see the most brilliant minds in history saying that hard-work is almost everything and for sure they know it.

People are amazing identifying patterns, and that's what you spend most of your time doing in research (theoretical or experimental, even though that theoretical is a bit different).
Particularly in statistics, where there is this randomness associated, one can never celebrate too soon if something you're working on effectively "works".
Statistics is a bit tricky in this, because you can never be too confident that you have some pattern or "working" thing to in the end realize that you were just super"lucky". Having then to deal with the after-unhappiness and -disappointment ...

This is why I have the feeling that people from statistics can never get up the chair in the middle of the office and scream "YESSS!" in this moment of "heat" (at least not because of work).
You really need to be extra careful before doing any celebration... test all the things ...many times... and many times again.... and many times again... confirm the statistics... etc etc
This of course applies to all the research, whether you're in the lab, or trying to represent some physical phenomena with maths.

Nevertheless, with this feeling of "never-eureka" coming, comes preserverance and "earth-footing"  which is of major importance to at least complete a PhD.
 
Well, not that was expecting to have it in first place... But it is funny. Movies are always better. Even more, progressively I feel that I understand less of what I am working. People say it is normal....

See you (this time don't know when I will have the strength to come here write)
Rui