Hey, how are you?

My summer internship is finally over and I can say confidently that it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. A major role in making the summer prolific was not the work but what I learned doing it. As I look back, I feel like I could have done so much more, that I wasn’t at my maximum efficiency, and so I would like to introspect a little to figure out what I could have done better.

Let me start by explaining you what I was involved in. No, not the topic, I have already talked about it earlier, but the program itself. As a part of the Summer Research Fellowship- 2018 at IIT Madras, I worked with a faculty member of the Department of Physics on a specific topic. The catch was that the faculty member I worked with wasn’t on campus for most of the time. So, after an initial meeting to discuss the topic broadly, it was on me to decide what problem statement I wanted to work on, gather resources to get acquainted with the problem and finally figure out a way to get through it. I was, and still am, happy about the freeom I was getting, intentionally or unintentionally, in the 60 days of research I was involved in as I feel that this is close to what my life as a researcher is going to be like. I felt it was favourable that I was getting to experience it first-hand at such an early stage in my life. Now, on to the things I could have done better.

• Literature review- My project was entirely theoretical and exploratory, so a major, if not entire, part of it was literature review, which means to go through already done research related to the problem in order to get adequate knowledge to tackle it. In the initial stages of resource-hunting (is that a term though?), I got a book that introduced the concepts I required and was dedicated to the problem I wanted to solve. So, instead of looking further I decided to stick to that book. While that might not seem like a bad choice, in the final days of my internship while I was making my report I was surfing the web for some definitions to include when I came across many papers and review articles which explained the same stuff that was present in the book but in a more concise manner. The book took me 40-45 days to get in grips with the subject, the later-found papers could have done it in 20-25 days, I think.

• Work Ethic- As I have mentioned earlier, a major struggle in my life is my fight with procastination. I came face to face with this nemesis of mine quite a few times during my stay at Madras. I had no restrictions as such, as the pace of my project was decided by me. Thus, wasting time was a temptation that was hard to avoid. I realized within the first few weeks itself that if I have to gain anything out of this experience I will have to build a good work ethic. A good work ethic should involve me making sure that I am being productive at a regular basis and working in a smart way. I was able to do that to some extent during the internhsip, but then again I think I could have done better.

• Too many things at once- In an ealier post I told you about my plan for the summer. Now that I look back I realize that it wasn’t ambitious, rather, insidious. I had too much on my plate to begin with, which led to me not being able to give enough time to anything. One thing I realized the hard way was that trying too hard to get a lot done eventually leads one to not do anything at all. Trying to follow the schedule I set for myself to cope up with all that I had decided to accomplish, I was so exhausted after 3-4 days that I ended up just resting and doing nothing for the rest of the week. Who burns out in three days?, you’d ask, well, I did. I stil managed to do bits of everything I had planned, but nothing completely.

I guess that is all there was, or atleast all that I could remember. Making ammends to improve at all these fronts is crucial for me as it isn’t difficult to see how if these traits prevail then they can frustrate me from becoming a good researcher. As I still am at a learning age (going to be 21 :D) I think that attempting to improve now will be much more fruitful than to face the repurcussions later. I could go on and tell you what all I plan to do, but I remember my mother telling me that whenever we tell someone about our plans and goals, we somehow become less motivated to go through with them. I don’t see a reason why that should be true, but looking back it feels very relatable. So, I won’t tell you what I plan to do, atleast for now, but if it does amount to something considerable, I will let you know.