akrish

With my senior year of college looming forbodingly on the horizon, I realized that I’m almost at that point where I have to make one of the biggest decisions of my life: I need to decide what I’m going to do after I graduate.

If I were Israeli this wouldn’t be a problem yet. I’d just be getting out the army, I’d go travel for a year or two, then I’d have to make the decision as I prepare to start college. Of course I only know this because I’m here, and
everyone around me is starting their undergrad at the ripe, young age of 22. I wish I could procrastinate it for at least a year longer.

Alas, this is probably not possible. I’ve procrastinated for too long already. However, this is not a lost cause. I’ve made huge strides in deciding that I want to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, which I guess I decided sometime during this last school year. To read about why I want to pursue research, read this. There are still many questions to be answered, the most important of which is: What area of computer science do I want to devote the next 4-6 years (and possibly the rest) of my life to?

For some people this isn’t a challenge at all. Some people take a class, love it, start research in that area and that’s it. Sometimes, I wish I were like those people, but things didn’t work like that for me. I’ve really enjoyed almost all of the computer science class I’ve taken, and although I’ve only done research in a couple of areas, I can see myself doing research on a variety of different topics. I really enjoy reading about the research being conducted in areas as broad as operating systems, distributed computing, databases, programming languages, algorithms, theory of computation, security, network security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational biology.

Aside: Actually, I’ve know about this problem for a long time. Whenever some asks me what I’m interested in I generally say “almost everything.” Most people think this is a good thing and I for the most part agree. It’s only if you plan on devoting yourself to one specific area, that it becomes “bad.”

That by the way is a list of candidate fields that I’m considering. There are two observations from this list: the first is that many of the areas are quite related. Like operating systems, distributed computing, and databases are “similar” in that they are often lumped together under the term “systems.” Same with algorithms and theory of computation and of course AI, ML, and Bioinformatics are very closely related. The second observation is that I could work on two of these things. For example, one of my current research projects would probably be classified under programming language security. This is a definite possibility, and something that I currently feel will probably end up happening.

On sort of another related side note: It doesn’t really matter what decision I have to make soon, it’s more of the fact that I HAVE to make a decision soon. Seriously, I’m not even 21 yet. How am I supposed to know what I want to do with my life? This is one of the things that really scares me about graduating (and there are many, many more, but living on my own in Israel is really preparing me to face some of them, and making things a lot less scary in general).

So how do I deal with it? How do I decide what to do in grad school, in my limited time frame of say 3 months?

My research experience has been largely in security, and I’ve been working in bioinformatics for 3 weeks now (oh my god only six more weeks in israel!). I really like both areas, so even between these two it’s very hard to decide. It’s
not something I can directly compare because my experience in each area has been very different. Even with experience, I can’t tell which one I like better, so who’s to say that I won’t like some other area that I haven’t tried equally or more? I don’t have time to get a feel for research in every thing I’m interested in.

So I’ve been stressing out about this for the past week or so, since my parents kindly reminded me that I need to start thinking about grad school. In my opinion, the next best thing to actually conducting research is to read about research, so I’ve compiled lists of papers for each area that I plan to read over the next couple of weeks. It’s going to be a lot of reading but from what I’ve already done I think it will really help me make this decision.