Monomorphic

I thought I’d write a more personal note for a change.

It’s been just over a year since I started studying for my Ph.D. — formally, I entered the program in April 2009. With at least two years to go, how do things look with some hindsight? What do I think it means to obtain the Ph.D. degree, or, more specifically and usefully, to be a researcher in computer science?

Much of what I’m noticing are things that sound obvious and natural, like everyday truisms, when expressed with words, but the idea I have of it goes a little bit deeper than that. For instance, we all get told over and over throughout our lives, starting in high school, that we have to become good communicators. So it’s not going to be a surprise to anyone when I say that I think the process entails becoming a much better communicator than I’ve ever been before. Maybe what’s different is that I am trying to communicate things that haven’t been communicated before, things that I invented — or things that have hitherto been communicated only by a very small number of people. (Most of the communication I did prior to becoming a Ph.D. student may not have been terribly original.) Basically, reading and understanding a large amount of scientific papers, and understanding them with a particular use in mind, either having or getting a sense of how they fit into your own work. Then, writing your own papers, and communicating, somehow, what you thought, and what you were the first person to think, so that somebody else might read it like you read the works of others, and use it similarly. Then, presenting research, discussing it, and understanding what is being presented and discussed by others — similar challenges in speech instead of in writing.

I can’t speak for other fields, but in computer science ( I work with programming languages and software engineering), I find that a lot of this, for me, has been about building up a certain mental dexterity with formalisms. Understanding the implications of formalisms as you read about them and seek to apply them. Communicating formalisms to others. Some of this is still difficult, in particular the “communicating to others” part, but I think I am achieving things in this regard.

Communication, then, where does it take us? One of my mental images of academic knowledge is a big directed acyclic graph (a tree) where papers reference other papers. A surprisingly big part of writing a paper is ensuring that your work can get assimilated into this graph easily — placing it well, referencing the right things, making sure that you can be referenced easily. Also: defining the boundaries of your work extremely well — here’s where it begins, here’s where it ends. We assume precisely this and arrive at precisely that. It really seems that these things can never be made clear enough.

Which leads to another mental image of research: the paper/unit of work as a building block. The more solid it is, and the harder and sharper its surfaces and edges are, the better structures can be built from it (though I think there are other kinds of valuable works too). That’s one direction I think I need to be aiming for as an aspiring researcher.