What an undergrad student should know before jumping into a PhD program
… and how I am using RAx (an AI-powered Research Assistant) for my research
Hello readers! I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at Emory University. This is my first article as a guest writer for The Academic Rollercoaster. And I feel very excited to pen down my honest opinions — and thanks to the RAx team for giving all their guest writers such a wonderful platform to post stories about PhD life and independent critique about RAx : AI powered research assistant.
From the backyard pool of undergrad research into the stormy ocean of doctoral studies
I joined the PhD program right after my undergraduate studies. I was somewhat involved in research as an undergrad, but being a PhD student has proven to be very different from being an undergrad who is interested in research. I haven’t stopped being a newbie in academia yet.
New PhD students are absurdly easily identifiable. May not be the ones who have done formal research before. But more specifically the ones whose research experience only goes as far as being a part of a bigger research project, and achieving certain specific well-defined goals with almost step-by-step instructions. We haven’t read as many papers as our peers in our labs, and sort of need to be told which ones to read. We definitely haven’t figured out our thesis topics. (We also do not make random references to the paper reviewers or Hidden Markov Models in our conversations a lot or know where all the printers in the department are, but that is beside the point.) Basically, we’re exploring.
New PhD students are absurdly easily identifiable. Basically, we’re just exploring.
Key takeaways — read, write, organize, repeat!
One of the most important things I have learned during my first year is the necessity of staying organized and documenting each and everything you do systematically. Sometimes, when you’re working on a research problem, you realize that to solve this one, you first need to solve another problem, which is a non-trivial research question in itself. And then you shift to trying to find a quick-fix for that, only to discover new problems. It is so easy to lose track of what you actually set out to do.
Which is why I like to write everything down. Experiment results and analysis, notes on the papers I read, even everything I think of while I am working. I have also slowly been getting into the habit of reading papers regularly for knowing the interesting work going on in Information Retrieval (that is my research area), as opposed to only when I start working on a project and my advisor points me to some and says, “These papers should be helpful.”
Sometimes, when you’re working on a research problem, you realize that to solve this one, you first need to solve another problem, which is a non-trivial research question in itself.
My experience with an online research assistant (RAx) so far
I have been using RAx to maintain my research journal and notes on papers. RAx is a pretty helpful tool for cataloguing your thoughts, readings, and notes in one place. Plus, it does an amazing job of finding papers about the kind of work you’re looking for. It is also supposed to adapt to a researcher’s changing needs and interests, which hasn’t happened for me yet, but I’m excited to see as I keep using it through my PhD Looking forward to writing more about other exciting use-cases!
