Reflection

I haven’t posted in more than two months, almost three. Here’s what I did: I defended and filed my dissertation, and officially became a Dr. The Weeks Before the Defense In my program, the convention is to send your committee a full dissertation draft between two weeks and a month before your defense. So for most of July, that’s what I was doing: writing. At the same time, I was working on a lengthy fellowship application and taking a two-week NeuroAI summer course I’d committed to months earlier. ...

It started with an error message. I was running MRI preprocessing — nothing unusual, the same pipeline I’d used before, the same steps others in the lab had run dozens of times. But instead of humming along, it stopped. Cannot locate files. I stared at it for a moment, confused in the way you’re confused when something that has always worked suddenly doesn’t. I checked the code. I checked the path. Then I checked the server folder. ...

I came across a simple but mind-bending idea today. Take the entire history of the universe — 13.8 billion years — and compress it linearly into a single calendar year. Every second of that year would equal around 438 real years. A single day would stretch across roughly 37.8 million years. The Big Bang happens at midnight on January 1st. The Milky Way forms somewhere in January. Earth shows up around early September. The dinosaurs go extinct somewhere around December 30th. ...

It was a Saturday. I was on my way to lunch when a Slack message came in from my PI: my recent paper had received a commentary, written by Dr. Joshua Roffman at Harvard. My heart started racing. A million thoughts came at once. Did I make a mistake somewhere? Did I overclaim? What if he found the work uninteresting, or not rigorous enough? I knew the work. I had been deliberate about every decision, methodical in the analyses, and conservative about every claim. But there is a difference between knowing you did something carefully and knowing how it will land once it is fully out in the world. ...