Junior Year Reflection

I’ve been trying to get into the habit of writing about my experiences; for my own purposes and maybe for others to learn from. This past junior year first semester taught me so much about myself.

In terms of accomplishments, I had a really successful semester. To summarize, I:

• got two first-author journal papers published
• attended my first conference and won “best undergraduate poster” while somewhat successfully networking
• got nominated for the Goldwater Scholarship by UIUC
• discovered a nanowire qubit idea and am now writing a third paper
• got a return offer to Johns Hopkins APL and made good progress on my APL project
• interviewed at Citadel for a PhD-level Quantitative Research Intern role
• started writing papers for HuLC concepts

At the same time, I also had a really bad semester. To summarize, I:

• burnt out five times
• got the lowest grades I’ve ever gotten
• badly tore a muscle in my lower back
• dropped two math classes
• was forced to do a complete 180 to recover my life habits

So clearly I went through a lot this semester. But what did I learn?

Lesson 1: The key to my success is both time and energy

After some reflection, my biggest lesson is that the key to my success is a combination of both time and energy.

This means that if I want to work on something important while keeping myself healthy, I must have both the mental bandwidth and the time bandwidth to do it. I learned this the hard way, since I’ve been told that I work like “I need that green card.” Basically, I would pull 12-hour workdays regardless of whether I had the time or whether I was energetic enough.

Clearly, this led to me burning out so many times, which then forced me to do a complete 180 to regain my livelihood back.

I’ve also taken on a non-negotiable: I will always get eight hours of sleep every day, so my energy is decently replenished. I’m also more aware of what my energy limit is, and I’ve developed better intuition for how much energy a certain task will take. I hope these things I’ve picked up will help me as I move forward into PhD life.

Lesson 2: Manage outside noise

All my friends are smart as hell and accomplished as hell. In a way, that inspires me to try things that they do. But this also means that I take on too many things that aren’t really related to what I do.

Not that it’s a bad thing, but this kind of “side-questing” should be done in moderation, which I absolutely did not do.

I pursued a quant route partly because I thought it would make for good “dad lore,” and also because some of my friends were trying to break into the field. Surprisingly, I got an interview from Citadel Securities for a PhD Quant Researcher role. I studied for it a bit and then bombed the interview. But the stress and pressure of that interview took a bigger toll on me than I expected.

Quant was just one of many side quests I took on, with each quest taking both time and energy away from my main priorities. So I’ve learned to manage this outside noise by being more realistic about my time and energy whenever I feel the impulse to take on more opportunities.

Now, my rule is that I will restrict the number of major commitments to 3, with 2 minor commitments. For this next semester, my 3 major commitments will be:

1. classes
2. UIUC research
3. APL work

My 2 minor commitments will be decided throughout the semester.

Lesson 3: Sectioning off time

I work on tasks for far too long, which drains both my energy and my time. So I’m starting to section off hard blocks of time to work on my projects, and once that time is over, I stop working.

But the way that I work is weird, so I’m trying not to schedule myself to work on too many different things at the same time. I’m still working on this lesson, so this one may evolve as time goes on.

Here’s to my next semester, and my final push until graduate school applications open up.