Introduction
There are two viewpoints: big picture and day-to-day. For the past 1.5 years, I have lived in the day-to-day. I constantly felt like I needed to fix code, run code, learn some theory, etc. Living in this day-to-day mindset has impaired my ability to reflect. Reflection generates feedback to improve. Coming back from a 10 day vacation, I feel like now is the best shot I’ll have to reflect on my PhD so far and, hopefully, improve.
Pre-PhD
The story should really begin before I got accepted into a PhD program. As a college senior, I had an overinflated sense of my ability to do physics (big fish, small pond). I hoped to work on what I thought was the fundamental problem of physics: establishing a mathematically rigorous quantum field theory. Enamored by the beauty of algebra, I applied to a prestigious program to work on algebraic quantum field theory, among others. When the results came in, my inflated bubble popped. I got some acceptances but I did not get into the programs I had most hoped for. I was saddened by the results because they made me to consider that I did not have as great potential as a physicist as I thought I had. If I had to boil this experience down into a single lesson, I’d say:
Other people are not a reliable measure of my ability. I was told almost verbatim by one of my undergraduate advisors that a prestigious program would be a safety for me. This only fed the inflation and turned out to be very wrong. On the flip side, this also means that my rejections are also not a reliable measure of my ability. In this sense, internalizing this lesson frees my mind from the fetters of external input. Even so, it still feels bad when I infer from others that I did a bad job and it still feels good when I infer from others that I did a good job. I just need to maintain to my own internal feeling of what kind of job I did. It’s easy to retort but how do I know what kind of a job I did! In fact, in many situations it is easy to make an excuse that extinguishes any need to think and change. There are no excuses: I have an internal sense of what kind of a job I did, and I just need to listen to it.
At the end (after also considering a two-body problem), I choose to attend the University of Rochester. I am quite happy with my choice now, but only due to the sheer luck of a new faculty hire who later became my advisor. Thinking about how pure luck impacted my fate is sobering; I must work harder and smarter to maximize the chance that I get what I want in the future.
Fall 2024
During this semester, I took some core courses and began talking to a professor that I wanted to work with (before the aforementioned new hire was announced). The courses were uninteresting as I knew most of the content from what I self-studied during my undergraduate years. I talked with the professor about potential projects that I could work on. I was intrigued by their interest in quantum foundations (what I had worked on in my undergraduate years) but was dissuaded by the practical considerations of pursuing a career in quantum foundations. We eventually landed on a project which aimed to analyze the flow of information through a top quark decay process. Thereafter, I spent most of my time writing my first (unsuccessful) fellowship application and learning miscellaneous physics unrelated to the project, reminiscent of my undergraduate days.
Above all this noise, one note rang clear. I didn’t know what I wanted to make out of my PhD anymore. I didn’t get my dream of working on rigorous QFT, so I felt like I had to fit myself into one of the few options available. This made for an unproductive semester, among other things. As I considered how to move forward with this situation a real deus ex machina event occurred in the form of a new faculty hire.
Brian Yong-Ho Lee 