I am glad that I could survive on three-hours sleep per day for almost two weeks. Of course, there were quite a few downsides: I felt very weak after the first several days, and the feeling lasted till the end; I lost 1 and dropped the other 2 times of tennis matches in this period; my Github longest streak of contribution stopped at 200 days, which is the date right before my comprehensive defense…
The things that I completed in return include:
- A 96-pages thesis for the comprehensive defense
- A collection of decent slides built by Beamer/Latex for defense
- Passed it =D
- A part of one NSF proposal
- One research paper submitted to Globecom’14
- Mid-term II of Game Theory
- One reviewing paper from EuraSip
- The least amount of homework and projects in Coursera that keep me within the schedule
Furthermore, there are lots of lessons to take away from this process. Concerning the defense about research, I find myself still need to adjust the strategy handling problems. In research, it is not about getting thing done, but about how to propose the right question (relevant with the basic/advanced theorems of the related fields) and to make at least some sense out of it.
For the research, I should not pile up most of the work to the last week of the due date, especially when I could anticipate this busy schedule months before. In Jan. and Feb., I did waste plenty of time to try out different algorithms handling the problem, but none of them had the “sky-high” performances, so I just kept trying. Eventually, when the time run out, I chose the “sub-optimal” solution and wrote the paper in a hurry. This should not be the right way. Sometimes, when the theoretical merits are fascinating, I might need to only derive the theorems and formulas with some naive simulations. When the trial and error process has to perform, I should set a “early termination” threshold and record every “best effort” in different scenarios. It will help me leisurely handle the due date, and maybe produce more work/papers.
I hope I won’t have this kind of busy schedule again, in the sense that I have a better planning and complete each work as soon as I can.