Numerous studies have concluded the importance of sleep for the wellness of brain functioning. A good night’s sleep not only refreshes the mind but also, in my personal case, often yields good ideas, and solutions to difficult problems. The best description I have seen so far is this:
We cannot do anything else when we are sleeping because it is when we work the hardest.
– Neal Stephenson, in Anathem
I am not trying to jump into the bandwagon, but there appears to be a civil-right scale movement happening in the Asian-American community now.
I found a few articles worth reading:
A forbes article about lessons learned from Jeremy Lin.
What I see in Jeremy Lin, an article I found through ESPN. And another good one by J.A. Adande, one of my most favorite ESPN writers. (Yes, you can actually learn something in a sports page.)
Paper tigers, a provocative article about Asian-Americans. I agreed with some of the points, disagreed with others, but found most of them very interesting.
I guess it is a sign of getting senior that I am spending more and more time writing letters of recommendation for guys seeking jobs.
A common question is about how to perform well in job interviews. In this era of search engines and social networks you can find plenty advices on your own already.
Beyond those, I have one high level suggestion: just be yourself. That is it. The reasons are as follows.
Performance
First, if you be your natural self instead of somebody else, you are more likely to be more relaxed and thus perform better during your interviews. I believe anxiety is one major reason for suboptimal performance.
Pretending to be somebody else can actually hide your strengths.
You never know what the recruiters are looking for, so do not try to second guess them.
I remember during my very first job interview, I wore suits and tried hard to be like a normal person. I walked and talked straight and stayed on the central line. I did not get the job. Years later the hiring manager saw one of my talks in a conference. He came up to me at the end of the session and said: *why didn’t you do this during your interview years ago? You would definitely have got the job*.
Nowadays, when I went to job interviews, I dressed and behaved in my own personal style. Not everyone likes me and not everyone gave me job offers. But very few people could anyway, and at least now people reject me because they think I am not suitable instead of being not good enough.
Suitability
This brings us to the second reason. The purpose of job interview is like match making: you are finding a suitable employer, and the employer is finding a suitable employee. So, if you try to be somebody else during your interview, even if you get the job, you can still end up being not happy or not productive. This benefits neither you nor the employer.
During one of my recent interviews with an institution, I quickly discovered that they are looking for people with a very specific range of skills doing a very specific kind of job (despite that their overall theme looks extremely interesting initially). That is the opposite of what I want to do, as I am interested in a variety of stuff and tend to jump around in research topics. So near the end of the interview I just told one of the more senior guys that I really think I am not a good fit and I hope I would not waste his time further. The guy was totally cool and kind of glad that I be so straight. So I got extra time sightseeing that interesting city while the guys can go back to work without wasting more time on me.
Summary
Few people can score every job offers. So failure is not a big deal. Just relax, and enjoy the process. I learned more from my failures than my successes. The important thing is to fail and succeed in your own style, not following somebody else.
A few days ago I ran out of shampoo. So I went to a nearby convenience store and bought a bottle. When I came home later that day, I found out that what I bought is hair conditioner instead.
So yesterday, I went to the same store again, determined to buy the right stuff this time. I did not recall exactly what happened, but this morning when I tried to wash my hair, I discovered that I have two bottles of conditioners, and still no shampoo.
I tried to recall what happened, and realized that I have been occupied by a bug and on some kind of auto-pilot the whole time last night.
I am going to give it a third try tonight. I fixed the bug earlier today, so hopefully I can finally get enough focus to buy shampoo.
Meanwhile, I need to figure out what to do with all these conditioners. My hairs grow so fast that I have to cut them like every 3 weeks, so I seriously doubt if they will last long enough to benefit from any conditioners. Nevertheless, I am going to give them a try, and see if they will get shiny.
Basically, its main function is to be displayed on the front of the room during the committee meeting, so that people can have a visual reference/cue of the paper being talked about.
Even though the representative image does not have any practical value for the paper (it is not illegal to use an arbitrary image, like, say, picture of Lindsay Lohan, at least with clothes on), the committee members are humans and thus can be subtly influenced by all psychological factors.
Thus, it is to your advantage to use an image that can help your paper, i.e. conveys the main ideas or results while looks appealing.
This is a mandatory reading for all my (current and future) students with an initial Asian training:
First of all, let me share one of the biggest secrets of China (and to some degree other Asian countries like Japan and Korea as well as ethnic Chinese states like Taiwan and Singapore). Do you ever wonder why China developed this authoritarian culture in the first place? It is very simple: a conforming population is much easier to rule than one that can think freely. The Chinese emperors were very calculating on this; they did not even allow alternative sources of authorities to challenge them (like the bishops who can thorn up to European emperors’ arses). On the other hand, they also want the population to be reasonably fluent so that the country can be productive. Thus the duality of the Chinese/Asian education system: on one hand it enforces conformity, and on the other encourages intellect and hard working.
Unfortunately, even though this system worked for the past agriculture and manufacture dominant economic systems, a knowledge-based economy will require citizens who can think. So China will have to change its culture and education systems, or face competitive disadvantages.
Part of the fun for my past MSR and current HKU posts is being close enough to help while far enough to not get dragged down into the sinkhole. I am curious how much I can do as an individual, or there is really some grander scale environmental stuff that I simply cannot reproduce. Results so far are very encouraging; Asian students who worked with me for sufficiently long periods of time (at least one SIGGRAPH cycle) have shown significant progress of thinking skills and at least one of them managed to create SIGGRAPH ideas.
For the sake of more fun, I now extend my grand challenge to MSR Asia to all my (past, current, and future) students: the first one to publish a single-authored SIGGRAPH paper will receive my full financial support, out of my own pocket instead of any grant, to make the trip. (Really, it is not that hard; I am not very smart, and I did that twice already. I make this challenge because only with a single-authored SIGGRAPH paper can you prove your full independence, including creativity.)
Every research paper has to cite and describe relevant previous works, often in a dedicated previous work section, or sometimes as part of the introduction.
Trying to write a previous work section can be an excellent mirror exercise for reading papers. The quality of the former can be a good indication of how much you really understand from the latter.
First of all, spend enough time reading how other people write previous work sections. Pay particular attention to those you find educational, from which you can actually learn something, as well as those you find unhelpful, from which you feel only confusion and frustration.
A good previous work section contains multiple layers of information with different resolutions of details.
After you have a draft, show it to your adviser or other experienced researchers, ask for advice, and iteratively improve it. It will be an excellent exercise for both reading and writing papers.
Yesterday, my family donated to National Central Library of Taiwan the majority of the manuscripts of my late grandfather, a prominent scholar and writer in Chinese literature.
As far as I know, we did not have a chance to talk to my grandfather about how to handle his manuscripts during his life time.
To avoid the same mistake, I plan to discuss with my father, an artist with volumes of work in oil painting, water-coloring, and ceramics, about how to deal with his stuff when the day comes.
Fortunately, such worries stop at my generation, because all my works are digital and thus can be easily accessed and archived. (Though my PhD adviser once wondered whether his digital models of Michelangelo’s sculptures will actually last longer than the physical objects themselves.)
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
– Jonathan Swift
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