entry 1 of blog version 2.0

prelude:

the people have spoken and i have listened. a few of you might have read the previous version of holden94122.blogspot.com, and might have liked it even. so you might know that it was deleted due to my lack of time to properly maintain updates on it. though my schedule remain very busy, i think in this version, i will try to keep the entries short and to the point, so as to save time. so for those of you who enjoyed reading the last blog, please feel free to make comments as well as suggestions.

the new blog is titled "struggles, confusion, and optimism". i think those three words characterize very well my life as of now. struggles mostly refer to school work; confusion is what i have been experiencing since coming to grad school; and optimism is what i hold for the future. each entry from now on will be labeled by one or more of these three words, depending on the content of the entry. also, i'm thinking going back to the original rating system developed by dan and chris. a number will be assigned at the end of everyday, based on my activities during the day. academics and daily life will be the two major weighing factors that i taking into account in assigning myself a score. not sure if dan, chris, and derek are still using a rating system. perhaps i will check later.


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now today's entry: optimism. after group meeting with advisor last friday, i felt a little more optimistic about my academic future. the majority of the group meeting composed of eating pizza while giving updates on research, huang zheng giving a presentation on the papers he read recently, and dr. Cui asking a bunch of difficult questions and getting mad at huang zheng's terrible english. so basically how group meeting goes every friday.

but toward the end of the meeting dr. cui said something that kind of hit me differently. he told us that it's not important to him how long we take to make big progress. it's ok as long as we make a little progress every day. the learning process is a long one. he himself didn't publish his first paper until 3rd year of grad school. but because he was able to set a good foundation, and cumulate material over the first two years, in his 4th year, he published 4 papers.

what he said made me think about what i have been trying to do since i first got to grad school. i kept on thinking that i need to learn a bulk of things right away, so as to catch up to the other people in my dept. but what i really need to do is to take small steps. no matter how small the steps, as long as i keep it consistent, it will lead to good results later on. this is one of the reasons why i think keeping a blog would be beneficial in the long run. it allows me to keep track of things everyday to make sure that i have done what i need to do, to take those small steps.

now that i have spent about 20 minutes on this, time to get back work.
1/29/08 rating: 7