My first paper submission during my PhD: A painful experience

In 6 weeks straight, I didn’t have time to slow down and take a rest. Every day is a full 12-14-hour working day. Sometimes I cried because it helped to relieve my stress.

At the beginning of the Spring semester, I imagined that I would finish my current project before May, then I can enjoy the last two weeks of the semester. Yet, as usual, things go wild! Time flied and till the first week of April, I was still designing experiments. There was no clear plan to execute yet.

After a week of doing no research due to health problem, I got back to the track and never stopped until the paper submission deadline. First, I had to design the experiment according to comments from colaborators, then ran all of that. OpenAI o3 really did a good job in … burning 150 USD in our lab account just within a day! After that, I wrote the paper from scratch, along with running the rest of analysis experiments. I could feel the heat of the approaching deadline, and I couldn’t think about any other matter during the time. I remember that once I believed I can wrote the full paper in just two days, as writing the methodology was straight and easy. In reality, yes, writing the methodology was straight and easy, but creating the figure and writing up the introduction were not! It’s really a communication problem rather than a technical problem. I needed to choose a proper way to call and describe the methodology as well as the clear insight with numbers from experiment result, meanwhile to ensure the consistency in wording. What a painful progress!

After three weeks, I finally produced a submittable version of my paper. But guessed what, due to a technical loophole in our experiment design, I needed to re-ran all experiments again! That meant I have to get a whole new set of results and update the number in the paper within one week. Not to mention I have to do TA grading and relocation for my summer internship. Unbelievable! Fortunately, I managed to submit the paper 1 hour before the deadline.

I could say I enjoy research, but I also admit that I don’t like the excessive pressure it brings to me. In 6 weeks straight, I chose not to play sport, because I know that my body might be fatigued, which affects my academic performance. In 6 weeks straight, I didn’t want to leave my seat even for a moment, because I always had things to do and wanted to do one after another, and yes, it made body so weak. In 6 weeks straight, I didn’t have time to call my parents and my girl friend regularly, no time to interact with my friends. In 6 weeks straight, I had to deal with a ton of disagreements among members in the project, as only till the moment, people cared about details. And, I can only manage to submit the paper to the conference 1 hour before the deadline … What a painful journey!

My final words in this post is a huge thank to my girlfriend, who understood my hard time and did not pose any personal pressure on me! Her understanding was the key for me to fully focus on the paper and make it to the conference. I owed her my time that should spend on the relationship. After the paper submission, finally I can “pay” it back to her. Cheers!