8:55 PM, Novermber 9th, 2024
Edited 12:30 PM, November 10th, 2024
This is going to be a long blog post I think, but I have a lot to say. First, I’ve thought a lot more about this blog and what it should be for, and I’ve decided that instead of it being sort of a hodgepodge of random content that interests me, I am instead going to use the blog to track my PhD journey. Ideally, this would have begun when I first started the PhD, since I am now a second year, but maybe I’ll make some blog posts that talk about what the first year was like to fill that gap. Also, I don’t know how big of a deal that gap is since the first year was all coursework and earned me a Master’s, and a lot of people entering PhD programs in Stats come in with a Master’s and can skip some of those first year courses anyway. The harder of the two qualifying exams that we have here at the U of R is still ahead of me, as are a lot of the other courses (a link to the full program courseload and info about qualifying exams can be found here), since the program requires 64 credits of courses (16 classes), more courses than required by most PhD programs, even having completed my first year I am still only halfway done with courses, although I am now about halfway done with my fall semester second year courses. Anyway, I think that people who are interested in learning about what being in a Stats PhD program is like might find such content interesting, and even if nobody ever sees it I think I will enjoy having a record of my journey from second year who is still trying to figure out what they’re interested in (and has no idea what they want to do for a dissertation) and still really doesn’t even know what they want for the rest of their life to (fingers crossed) a PhD with a completed dissertation, a few papers published, and a post-doc at a good institution or a job offer from a pharmaceutical company (or something else depending on where the journey takes me).
For the last week and a half, I’ve been feeling not very well at all, with a variety of symptoms that I don’t really want to get into, but I really didn’t feel great for a while and I didn’t want to be at the department much because I didn’t want to get anyone else sick. It turned out I had an ear infection when I finally went to see a doctor, so I wasn’t ever really infectious, but the point is I was partially taken out for a week or so and I missed several classes and got behind on research work I had been supposed to do, and it actually wasn’t that big of a deal. It isn’t the end of the world. And the reprieve I had to make myself take in order to get better gave me a lot of time to think. I realized that I’ve sort of been putting a lot of pressure on myself, and I think that’s something a lot of PhD students do, and I realized that it’s really not necessary, and probably is not very helpful. Obviously as a PhD students you have to be meeting deadlines, completing coursework, etcetera, but you should also realize that everything takes time, and you can’t rush the learning and understanding of ideas, because it just takes time. And if you try to rush it, you end up with gaps in your understanding, and more importantly you lose the enjoyment of it. And learning interesting things is really, really fun, or at least it should be when it’s done right. Something that Professor Marengo used to tell me was that “math is all about focus”, and the more math I’ve had to learn the more I’ve realized that that’s true. The best deep intellectual work your brain can do, either in chess or in math or programming or writing or any similar mentally intensive task, is done when you drown out all of the brain noise, all of the distractions, and are just completely dialed in to the task at hand. You just cannot multitask, you can’t have multiple tabs open in your brain browser. When I took measure theory my first semester of grad school, there were many problems that required more than a days focus. The really hard math problems often require an amount of focus that you can’t give all at once. It requires you to focus for a couple hours just to make a teeny bit of progress, and then you have to leave and come back later in the day or sometimes the next, and then sometimes you realize your initial thinking was wrong when you come back to the problem and have to start again. But the reward once you get it and you really understand a difficult problem, whether it be in chess or math, is a feeling of pride and joy in your ability and the strength of your mind that’s unmatched by any other activity. And the feeling that you get when you’ve implemented focus on something not as intellectually intensive but that still required a lot of effort and time, and you can look at this thing that you’ve made with your mind and your creativity and say ‘I did this’ is a wonderful sensation of accomplishment and self-efficacy.
Another thing he used to tell me was “don’t let schooling get in the way of your education”, and I think that’s another area in which I’ve been weak this past year. I’ve been so focused on coursework that I haven’t been teaching enough to myself about topics in statistics that I want to learn about. And this segue’s into the next thing I want to talk about, which is this interest I’ve suddenly found and plan to learn more about in Optimizing a Dynamic Treatment Regime, which is tied to reinforcement learning. I became interested in the topic because of a conversation I had with another student in the program, and when for Causal Inference we were assigned as our “midterm” to give a presentation about a paper related to Causal I looked for a paper related to causal inference that had to do with optimizing a dynamic treatment regime, and found one. This paper I presented to the class, and the presentation is attached here.
I plan to use the content of the presentation to make an entire blog post about Dynamic Treatment Regimes, but that’s for another day. In terms of future directions, I have asked a professor who I know has done research in the past about DTR’s to give me a reading course about DTR, but since he will only be available for part of the semester I am still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do. I am also thinking about dropping the “concentration in biostatistics and computational biology” from my PhD as it requires me to replace a course that I am very interested in taking (Stochastic Processes) with a course that I am not so interested in taking (Intro to Quantitative Biology) unless I want to take both, and I also don’t really plan on doing my dissertation in anything related to computational biology so I don’t think the concentration will really afford me anything that the ‘Traditional’ Statistics PhD won’t.
As for self-studying and taking my education in my own hands, there’s actually a lot I want to learn, several textbooks I’ve been meaning to read (Including the Resnick one which has proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be), and I am thinking about making a ‘self-study plan’ for these next couple of years while I figure out what exactly I want to do for a dissertation and which professor I’d like to work with, and I am going to have to narrow down the list to something that is actually manageable with school and set some realistic timelines for when I’m going to have textbooks read and exercises attempted. I think I’m also going to make a subsequent post outlining my self-study plan, and then I’ll make weekly blog posts about what I’m learning / have learned in the respective week from the book that I’m in. I think that one chapter of a textbook per week (or two weeks when I get busy) is a reasonable pace, and I think I’m going to select particular chapters of interest from the books rather than trying to do it all.
I am very excited about the future of my PhD, and I’m very excited to write about it all on here. I’m also thinking about getting one of those “Remarkable 2” notepads, which will help me write math that I can upload here instead of having to either type latex which is a pain or write handwritten and upload it which no one is ever going to be willing to try and read. In addition, and probably more importantly, it will just be so much easier to just be able to save all of my handwritten notes on my computer instead of having them scattered across notebooks, which are poorly internally organized, and that I always inevitably lose track of. Also, I tested one out at best-buy and it made me really excited because of how well it tracks what you write. The problem is that it costs $449 and I just have a lot of trouble justifying that kind of a purchase as a poor grad student. It just feels wrong because of the fact that the product should in my opinion cost like $249, since all you really can use it for is writing. The reviews are good, but I feel like the reviewers are the type of people for whom $449 is not as hefty a chunk of change as it is for someone like me. The other part of me says that since I spend $300 per month less than my girlfriend on my apartment then she does on hers, that it means I have an extra $300 every month by virtue of me barely having a separate bedroom from the kitchen and being routinely invaded by ants.
Again, a forthcoming blog post will detail my self study plans. I should add that next semester will be less busy than this one since I will only have two courses next semester and the Clinical Trials class is the least math intensive course in the program, so I should have a good amount of time for self study, and in fact I’ll have to do some for the sake of preparing myself for the Advanced Exam at the end of next summer. I also watched Julie and Julia last night, and that also helped inspire me to create a plan about what I’m going to blog about, and start making regular blog posts about what I’m doing. I can’t believe Julia didn’t like Julie’s blog. I feel like that reporter may have been lying. Or maybe the movie didn’t tell us the whole story. At some point I’m gonna see if I can find the original blog from 2002, which happens to be the year I was born.
I’m in Gleason library right now at the U of R and some crazy alarm just went off, so I should probably stop writing and make sure I shouldn’t be leaving because the building is burning up or something.