I started getting involved in research work in 2020, when “research” was still quite unfamiliar to me. By 2023, I had entered graduate school, and by the end of 2024, I applied for direct PhD. Over these four years, although the process wasn’t entirely smooth, I didn’t encounter insurmountable difficulties. From 2023 to 2024, for me it was both a new beginning (starting grad school) and a contradictory phase—this was my most diligent year, but also my most indolent. Diligent because I invested a lot of time in learning new skills, methods, and ideas; indolent because I almost completely gave up exercise, had no interest in writing papers, spent about half my time playing games (Stardew Valley), tinkering with gadgets (I love coding), my focus wasn’t on research, wasting a lot of time. However, this year wasn’t without gains, main achievements can be summarized as follows:
- Published four Chinese papers (three were commissioned project reports, each a few thousand words, another was previous work published in a CSSCI journal); one English paper (EI indexed, conference submission);
- Applied for two software copyrights (mainly to meet the mentor’s National Natural Science Foundation project conclusion requirements, quickly completed two);
- Received two academic awards (two conferences’ “Best Paper,” one was an important conference recognized by the Academy of Military Sciences, though overall level was low);
- Participated as core researcher in six or seven research projects (this type of work, though not technically challenging, honed my ability to handle different types of writing. However, after each task completion, I’d fall into a period of “paper burnout”);
- At teacher’s request, helped revise a fellow student’s Chinese C-tier journal paper (editing others’ papers is harder than writing my own, but thus got second authorship);
- Submitted a long-delayed English paper (this paper integrated two works, one was a fellow student’s, I didn’t even understand the details, so motivation was low during writing, after multiple rejections, reorganized and resubmitted at year-end);
- One ongoing work (biting off more than I can chew, progress slow, mainly laziness).