Confidence really matters.
For a long time, I’ve lacked confidence. There may be many reasons for this: being overweight during puberty, feeling dissatisfied with my appearance, and the overwhelming pressure in high school. Even though I studied at a pretty prestigious high school, I rarely felt that the people around me were smarter than me — sometimes, I even felt the opposite. But I think the main reason is that I was never pushed very hard by others, especially my parents. So in order to keep improving, I ended up constantly “pushing” and criticizing myself, often too harshly. Over time, this became a habit. I began to instinctively doubt and deny myself. Gradually, it turned into a kind of inner demon.
A few days ago, after chatting with a friend from middle school, I suddenly realized that I not only deserve to be confident, but have every reason to be. In terms of appearance, I may not be extremely handsome, but I’m at least decent-looking. In terms of physique, although I’m still far from fully satisfied, I’m steadily improving. In terms of academics, I believe I’ve surpassed more than 90% of my peers. In terms of personality, apart from being too hard on myself, I’m almost perfect. So why shouldn’t I be confident?
Confidence and humility are never opposites, yet I used to think they were. So I used humility and joking self-importance to cover up my inferiority. But over the past few days, after changing how I see myself, I’ve found that I haven’t lost motivation at all. Instead, I’ve gained a new kind of drive — one that comes from genuine self-acceptance and a sense of fulfillment fueled by self-love and personal growth.
In the days ahead, I hope I can maintain this mindset.
自信真的非常重要。
一直以来我都太不自信了。这可能有很多原因，比如青春期的时候身材太胖，对自己容貌不满意，上了高中感觉压力太大（不过尽管是在七中，我也基本没有觉得过身边的人都比我聪明，甚至相反）等。但我觉得主要原因是没有人给过我太多的压力（比如，我的父母），而我为了不断进取，就不得不不断pua自己，大多时候都过了度。久而久之，就成了一种惯性，导致我下意识的去怀疑甚至否定自己。渐渐的似乎成了一种心魔。
前几天和初中一个朋友出去聊天，我才发现，我应该且完全有资格自信：论外貌，我不说顶帅，至少也算是清秀；论身材，虽然确实还远没有达到满意，但正在稳中向好；论学习，我自认已经超越百分之九十同龄人；论性格，我除了对自己太坏可以说是完美。。。总之，我为什么不自信呢。
自信和谦虚从来不是对立面，而我以前却是这么认为的，因此用谦虚和开玩笑式的自大来掩饰自己的自卑。然而这两天经过对自己看法的改变，我发现我不仅没有失去动力，反而有了新的做事的动力，那就是发自内心的对自己的认可以及由自爱驱动的对自己成长的成就感。
以后的日子，希望我能保持这种心态。
]]>Anyway, I still think it’s a descent paper, the method was simple yet effective and I will continue submitting it. If it ends up nowhere, then it is what it is.
This experience together with my recent internships at several labs kind of reshape my mind of pursuing a research scientist position in the future. I strongly agree with Weng on the point that it is much easier to teach an engineer to do research than to teach a researcher to do engineering. That said, although I now have certain experience and perhaps some skills of research, there’s still a long way to go.
And as I said before, academia is fucked. This is especially true when you’re actually engaged once in the shitty review system. It either needs a revolution or will crash out first. Another thing is the academia is focusing too much on publishing itself instead of real world impact, at least most institutions do so.
The ideal job for me in my mind now is probably a ‘research engineer’, which means I can apply research mindset to real products and make real impact. Moreover, doing engineering does not mean you cannot make novel ‘academic’ contributions. To achieve this, I’ll need to improve my engineering skills, especially the ability to develop projects at scale. I’ll have to thank RHOS for offering such an opportunity.
]]>This OpenReview incident also led to some absurd stories — for example, the infamous “40-question reviewer”. While laughable, it makes me question the current environment of research: everyone is more or less blindly chasing the top conferences and yet, the acceptance probability seems increasingly weakly correlated with the actual quality of the paper, largely due to low-quality reviews.
I don’t want to be overly pessimistic (actually, I personally want to be a research scientist in the future). However, for now something is indeed wrong. As my mentor Mark said, it’s not ‘sustainable’. I and probably many other people know something should be changed, yet I and most of you just don’t have the capability to rewrite the rules.
Another issue I personally encounter and I think is becoming increasingly common is that: there are not many meaningful works left for non-top institutions (not to mention individuals). Indeed, scaling-up works are meaningful, and some works that require less resources are also meaningful. Yet, these fields are crowded without exception (or require more ‘intellectual resources’, like pure theory). And crowdedness brings most of the problems not only in these fields, but also the whole academia in general:
Again, I’m not blaming on anyone, it’s the environment that shapes people and most of us have no options. However I believe it’s valuable if one can stick to his original motivation and aspiration (which does not need to be noble of course, for example, for salary or just for fun). Furthermore, if no efforts are made, academia might eventually collapse one day and we really don’t want to see that happen.
(I still find it a bit hard to write articles that look native, maybe I’ll write in chinese and translate next time. Or maybe I’ll still want to practice, who knows?)
]]>This is normal and somewhat inevitable. What I want to say is, for people at small institutions (no disrespect to SZTE and there are many nice and wonderful people here, yet it’s scale is small and resources are really limited which makes me to write this blog now), it’s harder to publish with the limited resources (both human and computational) and thus harder to compete with people from more prestigious places.
I’ll be lying if I say I’m dumb, but I’m not a genius either. Therefore the same dilemma applies to me as well. I enjoy exploring and trying out ideas, and sometimes I can achieve some meaningful results (at least I believe so) that could translate to publications at solid venues. However, my current resources hardly support this now. I tried to reach out and did get some replies, though none of them gave me access to resources to the extent that I wished.
I’ll keep doing what needs to be done, pushing where I can, and see where this path leads.
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