2020/12/19/grad-school-research/

[utterances-bot]

Research During Masters · Arnav's Weblog

https://arnavdhamija.com/2020/12/19/grad-school-research/

[kaustubhsridhar]

Just reading this after our conversation haha. It is fairly common to have to both learn something new and use it in your research at the same time. For exactly this reason, I don't think courses are important. When research takes you somewhere new, you learn the new stuff by reading textbooks and papers by yourself. This is fairly universal in the sense that everyone from RAs to Profs come across something new everyday and have different ways on learning about said new stuff. The approach I find works best for me is to take the new stuff and rearrange it into a framework I'm familiar with. The things I can't fit into this framework I leave as black boxes at the start so that I can peek inside said black boxes when I have to be concerned about said parts. If all research was about taking something you learnt in a course and applying it to a problem, it wouldn't be particularly novel or helpful or fun. :P

[shortstheory]

Coming from the other side of this after having done the MPC course this Spring, I feel like now I would be in a much better position to tackle the same problems in the research project I had last summer. I didn't know how to identify a convex set back then, so I had spent a week on some idea only to find out that I had turned out a nice, convex problem into a non-convex one that wouldn't solve fast enough for the application it was intended for :P I think it would've been much smoother if I had spent more time on familiarizing myself with the background of the course rather than jumping in with half-baked ideas. Maybe the short duration of the project had something to do with it too? Anyway, it's cool to hear your approach and I'm glad it's worked for you!