Random Thoughts
It took me so long to write some random thoughts in my blog!
There were a lot of updates since the last writing in my github blog. I used to write some daily things and thoughts in my private blog(especially Tistory, which is famous blog platform in Korea) while my routines got broken by busy life and couldn’t even write diary in Korean.
I believe writing(anything) has plenty of advantages in many ways. Here’s three main advantages that I think of writings.
First, it keeps my daily life routine(at least for me). I used to keep writing diaries every night before going to bed. I started my writing since when I joined the militray which is mandatory service for every Korean men. I have no idea why I started writing, but the start of my writing was writing down 3 thankful things everyday before going to bed. This experience made me keep writing things even after my military service, which continued until now and I have almost 500 diaries in my private blog.
Writing made me organize things from my head that happened during the day and lowered my stress level. Whether it was a good or bad day, it always made me better - if it was a good day, writing made me think about good things once more and if it was a bad day, also it helped me relief my mind by letting down bad issues outside from me.
Secondly, it helps improve my language skills both in writing and speaking. Before reading books or writing things, I had very poor language skills, even understanding single paragraph and talking things logically was almost unable for me. After since reading a lot of books alongside writing random things, my language ability improved dramatically even I could feel it. Still, my English level is not that good but I have a confidence that I can improve in a same way as I improved my Korean.
Finally, writing helps me motivated and give me many good ideas. When I write about my future, I get more motivated than only thinking about the future, and also could draw my future in very details which makes me highly motivated towards the hopeful future.
Currently, while working on new project in my lab, felt some big emotion noticing that my programming skills got improved dramatically since even compared to last year. Last year, my previous team was working on some table-to-text project and I had a little bit of negative thoughts of the project direction which required very lower level understanding of the old pytorch library(v.0.3.1). In that time, I had little experience deep diving into a library and was struggling alone, then helped by one of our post-doc member. We studied together everyday day and night for months and marginally finished the project well.
Since finishing the project, I was so happy that I don’t need to study more about the lower levels and in the same time, quite depressed that it didn’t reuslted in publishing a meaningful paper. However, today I suddenly noticed that I was comfortable at understanding code written from one of our team, which was unable last year, and thought that the experience deep diving into the pytorch library helped me significantly improve my programming skills and understandings. I felt some big regret and sorry that I had a moment that I was suspicious of my previous PI’s direction which came to light that he cared much of my long-term improvements on skills.
As currently I’m doing my research in YaleNLP lab as a visiting student and have 4 more months left, I should work more hard because I have a lot of dreams to accomplish. In short term, after finishing my visiting’s in YaleNLP, planning to apply for the PhD to US next year. Hope the situations get better and I’ll just focus on the things that I can control and make efforts.
