How I started the journey? - Part I.1

“Do you still remember why you wanted to do it?” After 5.5 years, when I finally hung that piece of nicely framed wall decoration, I still remembered why I chose to do it.

It wouldn’t surprise me, if, in a few years, your memory becomes a bit blurry, and you couldn’t remember exactly why you started the journey.

Studying for a Ph.D. is an extremely demanding job, filled with moments of frustration and anxiety. Yet, it never fails to offer surprises and uncertainties.

You could start yours young and ambitious, determined to be a scientist, and ended up having a regular engineer job somewhere in industry; or, your goal was unclear when started, but your mind somehow drifted towards fighting an uphill battle of getting into some research institutes.

I graduated from Lehigh University in 2022 with a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering.

It is funny that my research had little to do with IE. I spent most of my research efforts cracking a specific subset of algorithms in the intersection of Computer Science and Optimization. A majority of the research groups in my field are under CS departments. If you know what ADAM or SGD is, you know 90% of what my research was about.

In particular, I was mostly concerned with the efficiency of training an ML model, and how to make the training autonomous. This is the field of designing adaptive optimization algorithms. It is still a cutting edge field, very little “known” and a lot of “unknown”. But, one day, we might be able to train a model at the scale of GPT4 in just a few (hundreds of) iterations from the scratch.

You need to be a little bit contrary to start a part-time Ph.D. journey.

It might be the case that many people have thought or will think about it at some point of time in their life. But, I am pretty sure only few would actually do it.

Looking around the people I knew, friends, family or acquaintances, I could count, on one hand, those who actually started their part-time Ph.D. studies while working on full-time jobs.

Looking back, I think I was a particular type of person, who never followed the conventional “wisdom”. Or, I should put it in this way: I never felt like following it even though sometimes I had to. From time to time, I often found myself having weird or even crazy ideas. I was certainly a contrary when I embraced the “torture”. Who would do a Ph.D. at an age of 30? Pretty sure that’s not a societal norm.

Being a contrary momentarily is very easy. We all had some flashes of memories of believing the rest of world was wrong. Being a persistent contrary is not easy, and being a consciously persistent one is often the most difficult.

We are living in a global tribe of 8 billion population, or over 100 billion including those dead for good. If only a minority group of tribe members is blessed, my chance of wring my own success story would be much bigger than the average if I was a contrary. In my view, doing whatever every one does or think I should be doing is fundamentally against my odds of living a successful life.

That said, it is still too early to call whether or not it was the best way to start my 30s, let alone justifying if I was really a wise guy. But, at the time of making that decision, I knew I was very conscious and would take a full responsibility of any consequences down the road.

In case I would ever regret doing it, I actually tried very hard to think of any validate reasons of not doing it. At the end of the day, I couldn’t figure out anything convincing. So, I knew I couldn’t get away from the idea, and I should just follow my heart.

I still hold my belief firmly till this day: following through a Ph.D. program is the easiest way to get knowledge and, even better, to create knowledge. It is a highly productive process, which has been validated by its own history. Every piece in the process has been repeated millions of times in the history, and the chance of having any unique situation is very low. Although the system does not guarantee any individual success, I had no doubt in myself.

Enough for justifying being a contrary! Most of time, I am not against the societal norm. But, I had my own belief of what I should be doing. I guess that’s also why I managed to finish the program.