The scene: someone in the CMU Discord, #scs channel, posted a link to a fairly cool article about a misuse of algorithmic complexity in social sciences. The writing was engaging, and I had time to kill, so I started reading other linked posts, and eventually got around to reading their latest post, “The 5 Year Update on Skipping Grad School (and Whether I’d Recommend It)“.

If you know me, or have seen my early posts (or really even the existence of the AI and CV tags), you’ll know really like AI and CV and potentially even be comfortable starting to do research in those areas. In fact that’s part of what I did for my internship at Aerospace, and if things go flawlessly, at Facebook as well. And yet, I don’t find myself looking forward to doing a PhD or Grad School or really even doing undergraduate research.

I think that’s part of why Alex Irpan’s post and especially its prequel from when he was an undergrad struck me. Here’s an eloquent guy, who’s done some pretty cool Reinforcement Learning research with robots at Google for crying out loud, talking about a similar feeling he was having as an undergrad. He put into words some of the reasons why, even though I think research is super cool to get done and is very nice to read, it can just get too overwhelming. Their writing is much more engaging than I can replicate here, but if you too are at least considering Grad School then I think both articles (and the ones he links to) are worth a read.

After reading these, my current plan of “just try to go into industry with a little undergrad research experience from a summer maybe and hope you can do cool industry research as well” hasn’t changed, and if anything seems even more feasible. Even if I don’t end up doing research, AI-adjacent SWE would be fun as well, just a different set of problems to overcome.

“Wow a Saturday post??? ur wildin” ya u better know it I just wanted to share this article lol