Career and life goals, basically¶
Thinking about my future career is as daunting to me as any person in their 20s - laden with anxiety, uncertainty and still with a lot of optimism. Most of the times the anxiety part of it wins though and I am left with a lot of hours of overthinking. And the fact that applications and contacting people are such stressful processes hardly helps the matter.
I had always wanted to have a career in academia and pursue research, and have from the beginning of my undergrad been interested in machine learning. It is a vast field in itself and has so many cross-discipline applications that it sometimes leaves me confused since I have no idea what I would like the most to study. This made me wonder about taking up jobs or internships to rake up some experience and gain more of a nuanced understanding of the industry, but while they have been invaluable experiences, I am nowhere near sorted out in my head.
I graduated last year, having done some research internships in my undergrad. One was on quantum computing too and not related to machine learning, but I was quite curious about the subject so I can’t say I regret the experience at all. I have had two industry jobs before the Outreachy internship, which were great experiences but felt like a mixed bag. I do not want to be in the job industry currently and hence have decided to apply for masters and apply for internships before I can get into a decent enough school.
I have had only one research publication in my undergrad, so one of my goals is to get some papers published and doing a masters hence became an increasingly appealing idea before applying for a great PhD program, because a masters degree can help me get a more specialized idea about computer science, machine learning and statistics. I am in touch with a few professors whom I plan to contact further for internships. I have also just begun looking deeply at master’s programs, and the creeping feeling of anxiety surrounding application processes is as bad as I had imagined. There are so many programs and selecting schools that have good programs is difficult, because I have to realistically consider my skills, profile and my chances at getting into competitive programs. Looking at yourself from an application evaluator’s perspective is not exactly easy, and then there is a quiet part in my head that constantly thinks if only I could get some more experience or papers under my belt, then I would have an even better chance at succeeding in getting into the really tough programs. This constant vacillation between two time-consuming plans for the future ruins my conviction very quickly. So one of my goals is to also get better planning and researching all my options to a fruitful conclusion, and work on my indecision!
Another goal in my life is to do technical talks at conferences and become a prolific speaker and writer. I don’t necessarily want to write about my tech-related pursuits, but talk about politics and sociology too, since I like following those topics a lot. Or I could talk about anime. I just want to get back my ability to articulate well - one which I have lost over the course of the pandemic with so much brain fogginess and little human interaction to keep my mind stimulated. This is not really a career goal exactly, but one I want to hone the most.
This blog post was pretty badly structured and written, but to be honest, this is what it feels like in my brain - scatterbrained and endlessly venturing into different trains of thought about the most crucial or the most insignificant aspects of life, like a particle in Brownian motion. But I have at least gotten better at doing something about my goals than I had been during my undergrad, like being able to contribute meaninglfully to open source, so I’m going to embrace small victories and try to continue in this vein. I just hope that my wishes and optimism doesn’t run out too quickly before I have done everything that I want to do.