Where I Am Aiming to Be and Think I Am (in 2023)

Authors: Nauka

It’s 2023 and my Ph.D. is coming to a close. Despite having an impostor syndrome like all good academics, I am trying to be more honest about my skills and achievments instead of downplaying them.

This post is me practicing this.

So despite it feeling really awkward, I do think that I am inching towards living up to one of my favourite aphorisms:

Jack of all trades, master of none - certainly better than a master of one

Or using a different image, despite everything in academia and our modern industry requiring you to focus and specialize, I slowly became a T-shaped person, since I struggled to focus on one thing at a time.

This hasn’t been easy.

I’ve worked very hard on collecting expert and almost expert level knowledge and skills in related but ultimately different domains:

• electrical engineering (I can design and build you a robot, but initially I’ll be slow to be good)
• chip design (I can design you an ASIC or FPGA deisgn, but initially I’ll be slow to be good)
• software/ML engineering (I can design you a complex software/ML system and I’ll be fast and good)
• ML and optimisation research - as in, scholarship, analysis and algorithm design - and engineering - as in, actually building and running systems at scale - (becoming good at this )
• economics and other research and scholarship (slowly getting good)
• teaching and mentoring people and leading projects (all of my students graduated with good grades and the feedback I get is generally positive, with some explicitly noting that they did not expect that quality of guidance)
• I have had practical experience in founding and running businesses (side hustles/startups I was involved in) and dealing with customers doing freelancing. This also included grant applications,fundraising, budgeting, navigating tax and accounting.

And on top of that I have had hobbies, maintained a social life, and dealt with some shit through years of therapy.

I do not recommend it. If you can focus (and if you think you can’t, you probably can learn how to from books or get therapy and/or medication if necessary) you should, and if I could go back, I would.

But looking back I think I didn’t do badly, and I’m looking forward to deepening my skills and knowledge further.

Living is learning, after all.