The year 2022 has come to an end. Conventionally, I have always written something to reflect upon the year and also to set targets to the next year. This year, I wasn't planning on doing so - but due to "popular demand" from a few friends and thinking it might be a good thing for myself, I decided to write it.
Summary of the challenges I faced this year:
To begin, 2022 was my first full year of being a "researcher". Out of studies and now with a goal/task to expand the boundaries of knowledge in one way or another (or at least in theory).
Starting with concrete things: I wrote papers, did some robotics prototyping, and attended/presented at workshops and conferences. For sure they were hard, stressful at times, and definitely required a lot of time to sit down and think about it. But overall I found these concrete things are the easier half of the job.
Rather, I felt the real challenges in the "philosophical" / "intellectual" thinking parts. Often times, in the lab we discuss (or raise the point) that we are doing science, not engineering. We want to introduce new and exciting ideas, and thus the implementation is merely a realisation.
There is one challenge here already which is to decide the boundary between research and engineering. While your system needs to work enough to show your idea, it's easy to lose track and keep improving the system and forgetting what the idea is to show (as someone who always worked on engineering projects, it is tempting to keep improving the system while it may not add any "research value").
But even this problem of science-vs-engineering is somewhat "figure-out-able". What I have greatly underestimated and continues to challenge me every day is that we are showing ideas - and that is the driving factor of everything that happens in the lab.
The challenge of selling ideas:
While coming up with any old idea is easy, there are questions and constraints that make an idea good working at different scales.
At the scale of a project, you question the novelty of the work, the grounding theory, the key message, how to realise the idea through experiments. At a longer scale, you need to consider how your idea will be impactful to your specific research community, and if so the larger robotics/scientific community. Even then, you could ask the impact to technological development - can this be something useful to society in any way? Which also questions the necessity of robotics research as a whole. Of course, you don't (and cannot) question such topics all the time, but nonetheless you can very easily question them. And to answer these big questions, you need some sense of belief about the field and the world in the future.
This is a fundamentally different to previous challenges and undertakings where there was a concrete goal associated. During the junior-robotics-competition days, my goal was to win the world competitions where the rules are clearly defined. After that, I aimed to score a certain grade in the IB exam to get into Cambridge. During my time in Cambridge I studied for exams and worked to manage a society to build robots for competitions and events. Before my graduation, I applied to PhD positions. While they were all challenges, the goals were defined. If I want to continue as an academic researcher, I think I need to develop long term goals/beliefs and be more certain with what I want to do in my life. Which brings us to the next point:
What do I want to do in my life? :
The short answer is I don't know. Which I think is not good enough.
Well, there are some (obvious) constraints. Based on my interests, my technical skill, my past experiences, I most certainly want to work on some research (not necessarily academic) based on technical projects that are related with robotics.
But this is still very vague and undefined. As a side note, I think in general, it's not a bad thing for options to be open and allow for directional changes along the way. The claim only goes to myself at this moment in time.
During the year I had many conversations about the post-PhD career decisions (mainly centred around if you want to become a professor or go to industry). When posed this question, I seriously cannot give a solid answer. From my past year I see the pros and cons of being in academia. But even before attempting to answer that question, I feel that I don't know what I want to "do". Assume I decided to choose the academic career. Then what will I research? What do I want to dedicate my professional years, and why? Will it contribute to the robotics academic field? Will it benefit society? Will it help people? Is robotics even something work continuing to research? And I legitimately don't have answers to these questions - at least answers which I can truly believe in and back them up. These questions are probably something I cannot answer with certainty forever, but I want to be able to better articulate my thoughts around them, to help me direct my life in the next years, which will inevitably affect the many years after that.
In my past reflection(s) I've written that I want to work on the field of dexterous manipulation. While I am very much convinced the challenges and the importance of solving manipulation, now I don't find this as a useful goal. Firstly, this topic is massive and has a long history + lots of people working on it. Hence it's a) difficult to make any significant progress, and b) a lot more specificity is important. Secondly, I don't think this is what I fundamentally want to achieve. Based on gut feeling, my fundamental goal (terminal goal) is roughly around the lines of wanting to help develop technologies which can help people.
Somehow I need to connect this fundamental goal with my interests, skills, life situation, connections of people I have, to a more concrete direction; whether that lies in academia or elsewhere.
So what do I do now? :
Good question. As I tried to articulate in the previous section, I don't have a good idea. I'm in the midst of finding out.
Here are some guesses.
Firstly, I think I should do more focused long term work. This year, in many occasions I worked on "random stuff". In practice it's not actually random, and it was for sure useful in many ways - how to think like a researcher, how to write papers, how to design experiments, to understand the broad academic field, etc. But I think I would benefit from focusing a bit more on a concrete "big" project. As opposed to a "random" conference paper (which is nice, feels productive, and if accepted you can go travel), aiming for bigger journals / more involved projects I think will help guide my high level goals/ideas better. I have started to do this more recently, so it's a good start.
I want to end the year with a few big projects with visible progress (and not just aimless engineering/improvements).
Secondly, I want to keep the intensity up. I am a believer that you learn and grow a lot for being active and getting involved. Sitting-down-and-thinking time is important but just because I have unclear ideas, I think it's far more beneficial to do-things and keep that going while spending pockets of time dedicated to thinking.
Thirdly, I want to see more of the academic world out of this lab. Basically, I want to experience to work in a different lab to see how it is. This might not happen this year, but at least the planning needs to happen.
I should also be aware that everything I've written here could change in the future. The way I look at my life has changed in this year, so the same may very likely happen in the future.
Final remarks:
Maybe it looks like that I'm spending 24/7 stuck in the lab from the above text, but that isn't the case. The great natural beauty of Switzerland has been amazing this year with lots of activities, skiing, swimming in the lake, hiking, etc. I think I have a good level of balance in my life, so that's going good :)
As always, I also need to give my thanks and appreciation for all the people around me and making all of this a reality. I need to remember that research is a privileged career. Directly I'm not creating economic value or helping people (I guess teaching is the most direct impact I give), and the future value is equally uncertain. But based on a stable environment, this is made possible. I should therefore be grateful, and also give the best I have for it.
Finally, I should also say that despite the challenges and difficulties I face in the PhD path, I find the work and life so exciting/interesting/fun. The decision of pursuing a PhD and the decision to come to EPFL and CREATE Lab was (although unknowable) a correct one and fits me in many ways.
I hope 2023 will be equally filled with excitements!
The photo is the Swiss alps (near Jungfraujoch / Lauterbrunnen) in the summer.
