Category Archives: Surviving Grad School

Helpful info on Do It Yourself grad studies, because you gotta do so much of it by yourself… But you’re not alone…!

Grad Students & Valentine’s Day…!

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This past Monday was that time of the year where lovers stress out to prepare gifts and plan special events – for days or even weeks, might I add – for their special person(s?). February sneaks up on you before you have even made up your mind about your new year’s resolutions, and suddenly there are heart-shaped edibles and every shades of pink galore across the city. The campus — the beautiful 993 acres of land occupied by more bachelors/bachelorettes in their late teens to late 20’s than married couples — is not an exception. However, such demographics (on-campus and within the department) makes romantic matters, such as Valentine’s day, difficult for a graduate student.

You see, when you first enter a graduate school, your age most likely belongs to the heavily overlapping centre of the following circles in a Venn diagram:

  • Old enough to have been happily married to someone, but too young to have gone through a divorce.
  • Young enough to still look around for more options, yet old enough to plan ahead for a happier future with Mr or Miss Right.
  • Perhaps a bit too young to have a child, yet more than physically capable of having and raising a child (scary!).

So figuring out where you fit in the Venn diagram is already harder for us grad students than those who are not in the overlapping region of the diagram. One day you might come home from the lab and realize that it’s too empty (despite the loud presence of your roommates, if you have any) and that you’d like to find someone for a long-term. If you have someone beside you, then you might be thinking ‘Should I really be serious about continuing this one? Is this person THE one?’. The next day, you might wake up and think ‘Geez, that was a stupid idea, I want to have fun, stay young! I’ve got my career to worry about. None of this romance nonsense!’ Regardless of which of the two days you might be having, the truth seems to be this – it’s hard to meet new people when you’re focusing on your research.

For one thing, if you want to find someone you can plan the future with (someone new, if you’re with someone already), then you either need to pick a person geographically close to your work/home. Otherwise, your over 40 hours of work during weekdays at the lab plus the work you set aside to do on weekends will consume and obstruct the necessary travel time to and from wherever the special person may hang out on a daily basis – unless the other person is nice enough to travel to you and stay with you at your lab that is – I mean, efficiency one of the core principles in engineering isnt’ it? (i.e., the mentioning of caffeine filled chocolate in the PhD comic strip below)

Second, and more importantly, your charm and charismatic character from undergrad or high school may no longer be as sharp as you think it is.

For example, after having dissected, analysed, hugged and kissed the topic of hesitation gestures for human-robot interaction (my thesis topic), everything around me revolved around that topic. When I see someone reaching for something and suddenly halts (i.e., hesitates) or even use the word ‘hesitation‘ in any sentence and in any contexts, I suddenly become overly excited and hyper. And before I know it, I am talking about my data analysis techniques, fitting splines through the hesitation motions I’ve captured, and how far I am in the project etc., etc.

Highly uncontrollable behaviour on my part and probably highly unattractive to someone I’ve just met, even to those who are seemingly as nerdy and scientifically-minded as me. So if you’ve got someone who happily tolerates the awkwardly-skewed charm of yours, I would strongly suggest you hold on to him/her — he/she’s got something that seems pretty rare out there in the real world.

Some of my graduate student friends spent the Valentines day by themselves — perhaps popping a bottle of wine alone in their residence, watching a chick-flick with the company of unhealthy yet tasty assortment of snacks. Those who have someone spent the day unwrapping a small surprise or two they’ve prepared – even with their special someone living overseas.

And many singles — who totally didn’t see the Valentine’s day sneak up upon them since there’s nothing to plan or prepare for, and are ever so slightly happy that they have been spared of the painful gift purchasing and event planning process — found comfort in spending a single’s night-out (or night-in) with the company of good friends.

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What to pack before coming to UBC – if you’ve heard about Whistler…

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A year and a half is a long time.

In August 2009, I arrived in Vancouver with my sister, eager to start my research adventures at UBC. My sister flew out here to help me settle down and carry the luggages that contained essential items to last me for the upcoming two years. Belonging to a highly non-athletic individual, my luggages did not contain anything that looked like sports-wears or equipments. The sportiest item I brought out to Vancouver were a pair of yoga pants. These were purchased for occasional stretching at home and much more frequent rolling-around-the-house type activities.

Some people choose to come to UBC because of its outdoor beauty. I certainly didn’t pay much heed to the outdoors section of Vancouver tourism handbooks, and I have my reasons.

Being a landed immigrant who lived in the snowy Ontario for about a decade, moving to Vancouver didn’t relate to ‘more outdoors’. In the geographically small country Korea, where I am originally from, the weather throughout the country is pretty much the same. From one tip of the country to the other, you normally see about a couple degrees of temperature differences, and maybe a bit more rain or wind over here compared to over there. Obviously, Canada is a bit larger than Korea – only about a hundred times bigger (100,210 km^2 [Korea] vs. 9,984,670 km^2 [Canada]). So you would expect more climate variances across the country, right? Well, I expected it, but didn’t realize the climate differences between Ontario and British Columbia even after my first visit to UBC in December of 2008. Why? Because on it started snowing the moment I landed in Vancouver, and what I saw in Vancouver weather was quite similar to what I was used to from Waterloo, Ontario. So I thought Vancouver is just another snowy city in Canada – typical, cold with slushy roads in the Spring too cold for me to go out and enjoy the outdoors.

Quite fortunately, I was wrong.

Vancouver is nature-loving, outdoor-lover friendly sporty city. In the summer, you have a handful of beaches to choose from (feel free to be picky about where you get your rays of UV), more than a handful of places to go hiking, not to mention a long list of places to bike to and from. Winter is never boring either. If you enjoy snow sports, you can hop on a bus heading North to Whistler and get your fill of snowy slopes. This is something that I am beginning to realize only a year and a half after my arrival in Vancouver.

After a lot of convincing from my labmates, I decided to go skiing to Whistler. Convincing was necessary because I am the kind of individual who has attachment issue with my laptop. Activities that does not involve my laptop scares me a little. And ski is no sport to be enjoying with a laptop on your hands.

Anyway, I figured that if I am going to graduate from a school in Vancouver, I might as well make sure that I go to places that make living in Vancouver much more epic. Whistler was an obvious choice due to rumours and other word-of-mouth obviousness.

So yesterday was my first time going to Whistler, and my first time skiing in about a decade. What I got out of it was epic-ness, aching of muscles to satisfy my need to exercise, and an immediate wiping-out of work related thoughts from my brain – in a good way, of course. The cellphone pictures here totally don’t do the justice of what Whistler view can offer you. It was too snowy for the camera to capture the snow-covered trees all over the place, and too white and bright for the camera to not resist white-balancing the picture and make it look rather grim. But trust me. It’s beautiful up there.

With about 130+tax, you can hop on a bus leaving the Vanier Place residence on campus, or the UBC North Bus Loop heading to Whistler, rent all the gears you need, go up the slopes on the lifts, and get a ride back to UBC on the same day. At first, I thought it’s pretty expensive. It still is. But the following epic-ness is worth it.

Obviously, my yoga pants weren’t going to be too appropriate for skiing. So I had to borrow my friends’ and labmate’s ski-wears, all of whom are male and are not as small as me. I will spare you the joy of laughing at my funny outfit for the day, and will also spare you the stories of how I got so many blisters from my skiing experience yesterday – which are healing very nicely, thank you.

But the point I’m trying to get across to you is this: For those of you who are planning to attend UBC, I think you should consider the things that you might end up loving – like skiing, or swimming. Because you might end up with one pair of yoga pants in your luggage, and wish that you had your ski jacket/pants/equipments with you for the next two/four+ years of your stay in Vancouver.

To make up for my lack of photographing skills, here’s the kind of picture of Whistler that I was trying to take:

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Start of the Thesis Writing Process … pg 1, v.00

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After months and months of waiting for a break, busying myself with papers, course work, thesis, and doing other fun grad student activities, I found myself flying home on Christmas Eve. It had been way too long since the last time I rolled around the house in PJs all day, ate belly full of food every meal, and slept in every morning.

But the truth is, although I’ve been craving such a break for months, it didn’t take me too long before I start to miss the packed to-do lists, deadlines marked and highlighted on the calendar,  and the quiet sound of the machines humming away in the lab that magically boosts the effects of coffee. Signs of a workaholic? Maybe. But I don’t think it’s (that) bad for you.

After two days of eating lots, being pampered by my family, and resting my brain with various sources of entertainment, I decided that it’s time to get some work done.

On the third day, I attempted to work from home – it never works well, and didn’t work well this time until every member of my family had gone to bed. Upon the continuation of unsatisfactory productivity levels at home, I now find myself at a small coffee shop in the small city of Guelph, Ontario. And, to my surprise, the first thing that I wanted to do was ….

… to start writing my thesis.

‘Wow’, I thought to myself, ‘I am actually starting to write my thesis!’.

I did want to follow the recommendations from my supervisors and start writing it early on. But with immediate deadlines and higher priority tasks on the to-do list, the writing process never got started, until now.

There seems to be a few things to keep in mind before and during the thesis writing process.

First, there’s pages and pages of ‘thesis formatting’ related information on the Faculty of Graduate Studies (FoGS) website. They’re very helpful, but also very long. It covers stuff from the font type, to font size, to font colour… i.e., detailed.

There’s sixteen different things that need to appear in the proper order of the completed thesis. A huge list of references will have to be put together in a proper order and format – which can be more than just painful if you don’t already use helpful reference management software such as Mendeley(freeware) and RefWorks(free for UBC students).

With all these formatting requirements in mind, I am first tempted to write the thesis in LaTex. The FoGS website provides a handy dandy LaTeX files you can use to automatically format the thesis to FoGS’ satisfaction. And with the help of references that can be put in the .bib format, you don’t need to worry about cleaning up tens (hopefully not hundreds?) of references in the final thesis later. In addition, if you’ve already published or written papers for conferences or journals in LaTeX, integrating the contents (including figures, tables, and references) into the thesis is just a matter of copy and paste; and the formatting will be taken care of.

But LaTeX writing is not so good for getting feedback from your supervisors and having them track changes – which Word does a pretty good job of. Is there a Word template for UBC thesis? Not that I know of. But that would be pretty helpful for non-LaTeX users, eh?

So I’ve decided to ignore the formatting requirements for now, write each chapter separately in MS Word, get feedback on the contents from my supervisors with the convenient track-changes features in MS Word, and then convert it into LaTex chapter by chapter for easier formatting of the overall thesis.

I will have to check the Vista website later though (currently out of service due to maintenance) and check out if there’s any helpful info on thesis writing from the Mech Eng Department.

Meanwhile, here’s an appropriate phD comics on the very topic….

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