my research experience

freshman year, at msu, i did psychology research on close relationships. that was boring

at the same time, i also stumbled into some interdisciplinary historical/anthropological research on this guy called lyman briggs (a physicist after whom my college was named after).

anyway the only interesting that came out of that was i found out that his wife, katherine briggs, and their daughter, isabelle myers, were the people behind the MBTI (myers-briggs type indicator)

sophomore (second) year i moved to cs research. that was also boring, though i somehow got my name on a paper that got published in a top conference

but that didn’t make it any less useless. (but i got to go to chicago for a conference, and that was fun)

third year i switched to another advisor and tried doing some cv (computer vision) stuff, which was less boring, but still pretty boring.

at the end of third year i was still thinking that i wanted to go onto a phd program in cs, and wrote a substack post debating/planning how i was going to escape to asia

which brings us to summer 2025, in seoul. my plan was originally to ‘network’ with korean professors at KAIST or whatever, but ofc i never did that.

it’s really true what my sociology professor this semester said,

how do you know if something is right for you? you do it one day, then the next day you think about it, and if the only thing you remember is how tired you felt, then that thing isn’t for you.