On last Thursday, I had submitted my first paper in system security, the conference is USENIX. Though it is not very solid results. I finally got it submitted. Many thanks to my adviser and Mihai. Their invaluable advice always inspiring.
I am going to list some deficiencies that I discovered from me.
- I am always procrastinating the easiest part of the task. This is not good because trying to put the hard thing first make me very frustrated if it doesn’t work out as I expected. My advisor told me and I also know it myself that we should put the simple task first and after that is the hard part. If it doesn’t work out as expected, at least I had gained something. Getting some help from others might get me out of the situation.
Lesson learned: Put simple things first, ask people’s help to complete the hard part.
- Avoid distractions if you had the clue to finish the task at hand. I remember the time I had to regenerate some figures plotted by GNUPLOT, I have to come back to modify the script and then to crop the pdf file, and copy them into the paper folder we shared. To repeat this many times in order to update the figures in the paper. Sometimes, I cannot help to do some other things, for instance, to peek the weibo.com or go to another tutorial about GNUPLOT to learn new features about it. This is unwise behavior in two aspects. First, the things that you learned in between are not effective learned knowledge. You might find them interesting at the moment but later may completely forget them. Secondly, not separated from the first one, they postpone the task that needs to finish soon. The urgent task at hand. The problem here is the capability to focus on one thing at a time.
Lesson Learned: Divide the task into pieces and then finish them one by one, without doing anything else.
- Start tasks as earlier as you could. This is related to the problem I discovered in the first point. The reason that we are very rush in the last few days is that I didn’t work hard as the deadline approaches. The case study part of the paper is very important, but it only takes about 5 hours to complete. How could that happen? This is doesn’t make sense. We are not super people, it cannot be true that we work out those significant things in just a few hours. For the next paper, the writing plan should be planed out in at least 1 month earlier. The majority part of the paper should be completed 1 week before the deadline so that we could revise it to be perfect for the submission.
Lesson Learned: Should start earlier, to avoid last minutes rush!!!
- To balance the research and coursework as well as reading and programming. Look back to the beginning of this project, if there is one thing I would regret, it is the time management in the past semester. I got one B in the network course because I didn’t put much time on it. I should change that! If I can balance time better this semester. I can get all As in course works and work out some wonderful research results. The coursework is important also, most of the concepts can be used in a job interview or future research. Especially the operating system and pattern recognition course. So work hard and balanced! Both coursework and research are important.
Lesson Learned: Balance coursework, research work, and other skills evenly.
- Avoid fall into one hard question and never get out. This is important from many perspectives. It wastes time, it makes me feel bad. Once a hard problem cannot be solved and you don’t have any clue to work out it in less than 1 hour. Don’t expect too much, for example, to start from zero and solve the problem, it is not real, you might not be able to do that. Start trying other possible ways of doing things or come to discuss with other people. Stop waste time on it.
Lesson Learned: Back off when it is necessary.