What I Did Instead of Making a New Website

Authors: Nauka

I started working on this website in September of 2021, when I was really struggling during my PhD. I was in the process of getting some mental health diagnoses done and was all over the place mentally - changing labs and topics during COVID19 does not make for the most productivity enhancing start.

Working on the website was the first step of tying together all the strewn subprojects I had done over the last 5 years and slowly start organising myself as well.

As I describe in the garden post (at the very bottom, feel free to skip the rest), this website now is an outlet for deliberately sharing intellectual and artistic activities that I know can be improved, but that are meaningful for me already, together with higher effort posts in which I try to live up to my image of what “good science” should be.

In between, I tried to write my whole thesis, detail all of my industry collaborations, all of my student projects and a bunch more in here.

That didn’t go very well. It was very useful for one paper that we are writing now though.

Oh yes, papers. I wrote 4 in the time between starting on the website rework end of 2021 and now. Depending on how you count it’s less or more than that, because 2 of those were resubmissions that got extensive rework. I will link them here when they are published or on arxiv, since I can’t put them into the open as I’d like right now. But especially for me, finishing those 4 pieces of work that was really mine was extremely meaningful. 2 of them got rejected in all submissions so far, but by now I’m okay with that - the reviewers weren’t good (one paper was rejected because of the coloring of the table!) but this is what you get when you play at overcrowded, high prestige and high competition venues like ICLR, ICML and NeurIPS - you might have living legends reviewing your papers, or it might be some overworked 1st year PhD student who barely understands your paper. We’ll continue the work on those two and resubmit and eventually they will go in.

I also actually started on my thesis (finally), albeit the last few months have seen relatively little action towards that. But there is a deadline coming up that I would like to target with what would become the first non-intro chapter. I’m actually excited to work on it.

I’m also excited about finally getting my ADHD diagnosis. It still have to deal with it, and it won’t serve as an excuse, but at least I can now start at dealing with a handicap I hadn’t known I was playing with before. This and a shoulder surgery for which I will finish the rehab period soon were huge ballasts on my head during the last winter, and now that they are gone I feel a lot better.

So to recap, instead of finishing this website in the way and the time I set out to do, I:

• went from 0 first author/equal contribution papers I am proud off to 4, 2 of which I expect to go into ICLR2023
• finally fixed a torn labrum that was giving me daily pain
• sorted out my ADHD diagnosis
• started writing on my thesis after years of deadlock

I’ll take that. But now I want to do all that and also this website.