Hello! This is my personal blog of semi-structured blog posts on topics such as traveling and academica (research and PhD specifically)
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The search for my favorite coffee bean
Recently I’ve been trying to find my favorite coffee bean. Typically I buy these beans whole and grind them whenever I make myself a coffee. I’m lucky enough to live close to several stores that specialty coffee & tea shops such: Porto Rico Importing Company on Bleecker Street (established in 1907) and Mcnulty’s Tea and Coffee on Christopher Street (established in 1895). From these stores I tried (in no particular order):
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A side quest for nachos
One of the most fun and spontaneous things I did while in university was to drive with some friends was take a day trip from Vancouver, BC to Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands. It was an entire day event leaving before 6 in the morning and arriving back in Vancouver close to 8pm. Getting up that early after a long week of school wasn’t something I wasn’t really looking forward to, but there I was outside my house waiting to get picked up. When the car pulled up it was two people I knew and two I had never met, and again I thought to myself: “what am I doing here?” As we set off, we all started talking and I ended up enjoying the company. The first stop post border was the Doughnut House in Anacortes, Washington on the way to the ferry. It’s a funny place basically a small shack thats a 24 hour doughnut shop that also sells coffee. We hung out there for a little to kill time before grabbing the 8:30 ferry out to the island.
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My Academic Journey
This is a short overview of how I ended up getting a PhD focused on computational social science, and how far it is from where I thought I would be.
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Overview of my travel
I may end up writing lots of stories on places I have traveled or want to travel but this is the start. I have been fortunate enough to visit many places. Here is what I remember
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What does it mean to be "Research Smart"?
At least in the United States many students are taught very early on (usually elementary school age) about the various types of “smart” there are. Usually these include things like:
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Why did I choose to do a PhD?
If you had asked me even a year ago, I would have hardly told you that I was done with school and was never going to pursue a PhD, but then a few things occurred. First the job market was (and still is) in a very bad state, with more people graduating each day in computer science and mass layoffs vastly increasing competition for every single job. I applied to around 1000 jobs with only two interviews and no offers. Finally, I was able to get an unpaid internship at a financial and sustainability startup working as a data analyst helping to develop the companies foundational models. While I do feel like I learned a lot and did make strong contributions to the company I found myself somewhat bored after a while, while also being stressed (that I wasn’t working enough, that I would make a major mistake affecting the results and losing us customers) which is a bad combination of factors for working. Along with this I realized that I really do enjoy research (and have been pretty successful so far).
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Why Blog?
I’m mainly setting this up as a testing website to play with github pages.