(The original version by the author is in Chinese without using any LLM, but for English version, the author use Claude to do the translation and then manually edited and rewrite some of them that she thought inaccurate.)

The narrative parts of this installment were all written on the flight back to China in mid-August; I added the more reflective bits at the beginning and the end and then put it up. If I had waited any longer, I would have lost even more of the feeling for my own words. Nothing in this “My PhD Grind” series is necessarily something the PhD itself brought about. Rather, I’m at a certain stage of life — a stage in which I’ve left the environment, culture, and education I’d known for over twenty years, begun to have my own independent thoughts and ways of thinking, and, in a new environment and culture, come into contact with many more different people and different things — and the changes in perception and thinking that arise naturally from that. Even if I weren’t doing a PhD, I would probably have gone through similar things and had similar realizations and reflections. It’s just that these people, these events, and these realizations happened to fall within the years of my PhD, so I use “PhD grind” to describe this stage of life. But I don’t think doing a PhD is the only way a person can grow, nor do I think I should “be grateful for the pain.” I try my best not to disturb other people’s lives, and I don’t want to intervene in anyone else’s trajectory, because I believe opportunity matters enormously, yet opportunities usually aren’t something you get to choose — and as for what’s left, the things you can choose, no matter how hard you rack your brains over them, they won’t make much difference to your life. No choice or experience is indispensable. So, I have no opinion. I don’t write these things in order to be understood, nor to “give advice.” Text is a medium for transmitting information: by the time I decode the continuous embedding of what I’m thinking into tokens, a great deal of information has already been lost; when a reader reads in those tokens and converts them into their own embedding, they add a great deal of their own context, and by then their embedding is nothing like mine. Every reader might be able to read something different out of the same passage, but more or less, they’ve seen themselves in it. I was surprised that my first post — the blog about many of my friends who works on theory switching to LLMs — resonated with so many people. Friends messaged me privately to say “they felt the same way,” or “they could really understand me.” But in fact, I wrote it from the perspective of a detached narrator, an onlooker, putting in almost no emotion at all. The deep feeling readers sensed in those words must have come from reading themselves into the text and projecting their own emotions onto it.

On August 14, 2023, I went to the United States for the first time. On the flight from New York to Ithaca, before we departed, the flight attendant proudly announced to everyone: “All the crew members, two pilots and two stewardesses, are women — isn’t this awesome?” Although, like everyone else, I didn’t respond, my heart was secretly leaping. This was my first impression of America: a place where anything is possible. (Because of how I was raised, my understanding was still stuck at “In China, only the flight attendants can be women; the pilots are always men.” Though when I looked it up just now while writing this, China does have female pilots — women make up about 1% of civil aviation pilot license holders, compared to over 10% in the U.S. There’s a lot of finer-grained statistics by category, but in almost every category, the proportion of women in the U.S. is nearly ten times that in China. And since the total number of licensed pilots in the U.S. is ten times China’s, in absolute numbers there are roughly 100,000 women among all licensed pilots in the U.S. versus about 1,000 in China — a hundredfold gap.)

One afternoon during grad school orientation week, walking home from Gates Hall, I passed the football field, where “Don’t Stop Believin’” was playing, and my eyes instantly welled up: in the months before coming to Cornell, I happened to be watching Glee (an American TV series), and both the show and that song mean a great deal to me. Against that backdrop of unreality, for those few days I felt like I was living inside a TV show, full of anticipation for the future.

That glamorous filter lasted less than two weeks; real life quickly yanked me out of the TV show. I — who had barely any experience of the real world, who had unreasonable optimistic expectations of the new environment and the people in it, whose personality was so weak that whenever any conflict arose I assumed “it must be my fault” — ran into a very mean roommate and had to move three times in my first three months. (Later, about a month after I moved out, that roommate’s behavior became so outrageous that the third roommate couldn’t take it anymore and eventually drove the her out.)

On top of that, the Chinese students in my cohort were almost all guys (there may have been one or two Chinese girls, but I never saw them around, and besides, not everyone gets along with everyone; as for people from other countries, there are obstacle in both culture and language so I didn’t really hang out that much with them). Watching the guys quickly grow close with each other, all I felt was loneliness. In October, the weather gradually turned bad, and once the clocks fell back to winter time, it was dark by 4 p.m. The weather and the troubles in my life piled on top of each other, and I gradually became a bit depressed (though compared to the depression of my second year, the depression in my first year should be consindered as mild). By December, I still hadn’t made any friends. Over the Christmas break the campus was nearly empty — the loneliest time to be in Ithaca, and the time my depression was at its worst. I would reflect on and chew over everything that had happened in my four months in the US, again and again, and ask myself over and over: why did it turn out this way? Although I never want to go through that pain again, looking back now, without those painful times I wouldn’t have come to understand myself better, and I wouldn’t have become who I am now.

After the spring semester started, the weather got better, and my mood lightened along with it. It was right around then that I got to know a more senior student at another department, and we’d play ping-pong together every so often. By April, we had gradually reached the point where we could talk about anything, and she became the first female friend I made after coming to the US. In my first six months, I had tried to become friends with lots of Chinese (and mostly, male), forcing myself out of my comfort zone, but all that socializing left me extremely anxious and dejected. It was only after becoming good friends with her that I learned what healthy socializing should look like. Maybe all I needed was one friend to stop feeling like there was “something wrong with me.” After we became good friends, I stopped trying, as I had before, to befriend people who triggered my social anxiety, because I knew that good socializing shouldn’t make me anxious. I also gained other friends around the same time: a Sri Lankan girl in my cohort, who is kind, geninue, and full of love for life, and a master’s student in economics (a sports buddy I could call up anytime to play sport such as pingpang, badminton, tennis, chatting about anything and everything while we played). April and May were probably the happiest stretch of my first year in America, apart from that first week — it felt like I was bathed in sunshine every day (both physically and mentally). In late May, I went back to China. The day before I left, I looked back over my nearly a year in America. Although the happy times amounted to only the month or so before I left, my personality had already changed a lot: I no longer tried so hard to please people to win their friendship, I was no longer afraid of being disliked, and I had become far more selective about making friends rather than expecting to be friends with everyone. That day, I re-downloaded QQ (a Chinese messaging app) and messaged a classmate back in college: “I feel like everyone hated me in undergrad. Can you tell me why?” I asked him because he was probably the only person I could remember who “don’t hate me that much.” I’m not sure what state of mind I was in — maybe it was out of curiosity, maybe I was in such a good mood that nothing he could say would affect me, or maybe I just wanted to confirm whether my original “feeling that everyone hated me in undergrad” was only me being oversensitive, something I’d imagined. I’ve forgotten the details of our conversation. After he told me to “think it over myself” and I couldn’t come up with anything no matter how hard I tried, he told me it was “because people felt I didn’t fit in with the group.” From that day on, I can finally let it go. That day, I uninstalled QQ and truly said goodbye to undergrad. Actually, since coming to America, I have never again felt “weird.” I found that everyone is pretty different, and sometimes I even worry that I’m not “weird” enough — that compared to others (especially some of my American classmates), that I don’t have anything distinctive about me.

That summer I went back to China to renew my visa. Although I hadn’t been home in two years, I didn’t feel much nostalgia for life in China — the high-rises, the dense crowds, and the traffic still made me very uncomfortable (I constantly felt that one careless moment and I’d be hit by a bicycle, an e-bike, or something bigger, because everyone is in a hurry and no one yields to pedestrians). It was my first time living in Beijing not as a student, and I met all sorts of people. Beijing doesn’t have the comfort of life as in Chengdu; Haidian District and Tsinghua were more run-down than I’d imagined; and the people I chatted with while renting a place, along with the Didi (ride-hailing) drivers taking me home at night, made me feel everywhere the hardship of the “Beijing drifters” — those who leave their hometowns to make a living in the capital. There were also plenty of things worth being happy about in between. For example, a girl I’d met at Cornell and I arranged to spend a day together in Beijing; we got to know each other better and discovered how alike we were. On the day we parted in Beijing, we chatted our ideal of a good friendship to be “close but independent” — a healthy friendship, one in which both parties can grow, should be like that. Afterwards, we constantly catched up with each other on the phone often and became very, very good friends. Later still, when I moved to the Bay Area, she became my only friend there. (The Bay Area seems even harder to make friends in than school.)

That summer I also went to ICML and ACL, saw some old friends, and met one or two people I’m still close with today. It was a pretty decent summer. All of this was a long, long time ago. If I didn’t make an effort to remember, I’d almost forget I once had so many problems (though even now I still occasionally hide from people I know when I run into them since sometimes I have nothing to say and become ackward if I have to start some small talk). Those are all the stories in my first year. There doesn’t seem to be anything PhD-related worth recording, but after a year, I no longer felt so broken: beyond the social problems mentioned above, my personality changed in other positive ways too — for example, I became more confident, I stopped feeling that I didn’t deserve to be at Cornell, and I began to have a strong sense of belonging.

Looking back, the first year was a fairly beautiful one. Whatever the winter had been like, when summer arrived in April and May, I didn’t feel a trace of sorrow. It was in the following two years that I truly entered the grind of the PhD itself, and lost many things I consider important — like the ability to be happy. It took me far too long to recover. Going by my earlier expectations: I thought I’d be happy once I switched advisors; I thought I’d be happy once the project was over; I thought I’d be happy once the paper got accepted; I thought I’d be happy once summer came; I thought I’d be happy once I left Ithaca for the Bay Area; I thought I’d be happy once the internship ended; I thought I’d be happy once I started the new internship; I thought I’d be happy once I didn’t have to do research anymore; I thought I’d be happy once I found a job…

Looking forward to one milestone after another like this, two whole years went by. Occasionally I would suddenly feel happy, but that happiness never lasted more than a week.

I had never waited for such a long time like this before, for two whole years — far, far too long. Hoping again and again, disappointed again and again, I gradually began to accept the state I was in. And as the happy self of two years ago receded further and further, in my second year I would still occasionally struggle, wondering how to find my old self again; by my third year, I had grown used to the self that was no longer happy. (I started to think that maybe this unhappiness wasn’t caused by the PhD, but is the inevitable destination once a person reaches a certain age and has seen a huge amount of people and things.)

Although this ending is a bit sad — and the next several posts will all be sad in tone — to spare readers too much sadness, I need to give a spoiler alert here: in August, I found a job and went back to China to rest for a while. In the process of cleaning up a past stage of life and getting ready to welcome a new journey, I also threw away a lot of things that needed throwing away (like some of the trauma and pain). The best way to find yourself again is to change your environment. Moving from Ithaca to the Bay Area didn’t seem to help much, since I was under job-search pressure at the time. But after finding a job in August, I went back to China to rest — no mental pressure, a changed environment, and a new life to look forward to — and I felt a lightness and joy I hadn’t felt in a very long time. With all these factors stacked together, I found my happy, pre-PhD self again (though I don’t know how long this happy state will last, while I’m happy now, I plan to enjoy it while I can.

Compared to before the PhD, the me of today is more mature, more emotionally stable, and understands more deeply about the meaning of life and how the world works. I’m also better able to find, in such a complex real world RL env, a way of existence that at least for now feels self-consistent, and to continue, with a more peaceful attitude, the rollout along the short trajectory of my life.