After the last blog post (which again is a long time ago) I wanted to proudly present my first accepted paper with the upcoming blog post. Instead, my submission at ICLR ’24 has been officially rejected and I might not be able to fully address all valid points of criticism put forth by the reviewers in time for a re-submission at the next ML venue. Consequently, in a few months I will be two years into my PhD journey without an own paper, a situation I was afraid of and very eager to prevent and avoid from the very start of this PhD attempt. When people ask me how it’s going, these days I tell them that my “newbie protection” has worn off and that I experience what has to be the standard package of inconveniences a PhD student has to deal with: Paper submissions get rejected and the reviewers are not always helpful, algorithms or experiments don’t produce the desired outcomes and you’re spending weeks on end trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong, you start to see the end of your current employment contract approaching without much “result” to testify for your hard research work, and the others have even less of a clue as to what you should do to become unstuck. Above all, your own frustration with yourself amplifies your unease because you have become by far the biggest critic of your own work. This is not least because you don’t want to disappoint your superiors and mentors, and maybe you even still believe that your work is going to profoundly impact the world outside your ivory tower.
This surely is not a nice mental state to be in. But after talking this over with a lot of fellow PhD students, I get the feeling that such a phase is incredibly common and occurs to virtually all PhD students at some intermediate point in time. All those feelings of frustration, sadness, self-doubt and anxiety are almost inevitably going to pop up with your first failure to reach your initial arbitrary plans, and it’s this phase of stormy waters that every PhD student needs to learn to navigate through. This is a test of determination and grit, and your wits and intelligence will probably not be enough if you can’t also endure a mental beating of this sort. What is helping me through is the acknowledgement of all the little steps I put forward, such as encountering and fixing several small bugs that do influence my experiment results, and the consolation and encouragement I get from so many other fellows. I feel like I am growing or developing a new kind of tenacity that helps me cope with the permanent state of “time is ticking and nothing works the way I want it to work”. And even though I am still somewhat anxious when thinking about my work, I somehow have the gut feeling that this tenacity will help me make it, whatever the final outcome will actually be.