Addressing My Absence
Radio silence
Hello again, world! It’s been a little over a year since I wrote a post on my website. I took a much-needed break from writing articles and making things to focus on myself so that I can prepare for the upcoming changes in both my personal life and professional life.
I had been considering applying to PhD programs since mid-2024, so I applied to three universities in December. The application process took up a large portion of my free time. Maintaining my website was put on the back-burner as I had to focus on completing applications and writing statements-of-purpose for why I wanted a PhD in the first place. Once I finished my applications, I spent the rest of December away from my workstation visiting family and recovering from being burnt out both at work and at home.
And so, I started 2025 with a very bad habit of talking to chatbots. Against my better judgment, I got hooked on interacting with local large-language models and image-generating diffusion models on my personal workstation. It started off as something fun to mess with, but it quickly devolved into a net-negative time-waster. I’m trying to move away from these “trendy” forms of generative AI in my daily life so that I don’t get sucked into it again.
My PhD applications did pay off, though; I am happy to say that I got accepted into a prestigious top-tier university in April! I took a break from my job after gracefully resigning to decompress and prepare myself for the upcoming couple of years.
I started my first year of my PhD program last month. So far, the most challenging part of my PhD has been trying to develop interesting, noteworthy problems that are worth solving in the field of computer security. I hope that I can have a good handful of papers published in top-tier journals under my real name and obtain my degree by May 2029.
The research I’m doing for my PhD requires much more effort than the research I did for my master’s degree, so I need to prioritize it above working on my personal projects. I’m going to have to cut back on writing more technical articles so that I can focus on the homework I need to do for my classes and the research tasks I need to do for my PhD. As much fun as it is to write articles for my blog, I’m doing this for free and for no reward except for my personal enjoyment (and I would like to keep it that way).
I want to start this new chapter of my life off on the right foot, so I’m taking steps to limit my screen time, eat more food, exercise, and talk to other people in the real world. I hope that I can at least squeeze in a couple of updates or fun side projects that I can talk about on here.
I did have some ideas for playing around with generative AI models, but I’m going to table them so I can work on non-AI projects instead. I still have lots of other ideas for upcoming articles and side projects, though, so I’m not out of ideas yet!