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A quick look back

Time flies when you are having fun. It has already been two years since I decided to join Princeton. Now that I am halfway through my second year, I want to look back on how I have been “philosophizing” my PhD journey.

My first year was full of joy and rejection. They sound like opposites, but my experience would not make sense without both.

What I wanted from year one

I started my PhD with two goals: publish a paper in my first year and fully experience American college life.

I set the first goal because I wanted to get my research moving and find my place in the group as quickly as possible. It turned out to be much harder than I expected, but more on that later. The second goal felt uniquely possible at Princeton, even as a PhD student.

In much of Europe, doctoral students have formal contracts with the university. You are technically an employee, and people treat you like one. Things can feel pretty transactional. Universities do not usually do much to organize social life or build community, so many PhD students mostly stay within their research groups.

Princeton feels very different. It puts real effort into building a grad-student community. The graduate school is small, with around 3,000 students in total, even smaller than Stanford’s medical school. We are all part of the Grad College, which runs a steady stream of social and academic events. Most campus events and clubs are open to both undergrads and grads. I have been hiking and skiing with the outdoor club, for example: it is university-affiliated but mostly run by undergrads.

Most importantly, almost everything is free for students. Princeton has a lot of resources, and it treats its students very well. This kind of campus life would be hard to imagine at most European universities, including top-ranked ones.

Hiking with Princeton OA.
A ski trip in upstate New York and snowshoeing at the IAS.

Year one in numbers

  • Number of paper submissions: 8 (4 as first author)
  • Number of paper rejections: 6
  • Number of grant proposals I helped with: 2
  • Number of undergrads mentored: 4
  • Number of books read: 9
  • Number of courses taken: 6 (required)
  • Number of high tables attended: 5
  • Number of grad formals: 1
  • Number of hikes: 17
  • Number of skiing/skating trips: 2
  • Number of concerts on campus: 2
  • Number of free meals on campus: +∞
High table with Prof. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, where I asked her about music perception.
Left: Visiting Penguin Random House (NYC HQ) on a Princeton CCD trip.
Right: A Broadway show outing organized by the Princeton grad school.
Brat-themed grad school formal with my friends.

A typical day

Princeton Racquet Center indoor and outdoor courts.
My little cubicle 🖼️ :)

Rejections

Getting a paper out in my first year was much harder than I expected, especially because I was working in an area that was still new to me. I used to think computer networking was basically “systems with different applications.” Oh boy, I was wrong. The field asks different questions and values different things, from empirical performance optimization to formal guarantees, and it took me a while to adjust.

I still feel incredibly lucky to be my advisor’s student. She is one of the smartest and hardest-working people I have ever met, but more importantly, she is a kind mentor. She stays patient when I get stuck and is willing to learn alongside me, even though my work crosses several pretty different areas.

Early on, I was probably not the easiest student to work with. I have strong opinions about research direction and experimental methods. At the time, I did not fully understand how the community I came from differed from the networking community. I also did not know how to turn my ideas into a research paper instead of a technical report crammed with engineering details.

I still remember my first submission. Right before the deadline, my advisor had to rewrite most of it because my writing was so far off track. She walked me through the process and even stayed up with me until 4 a.m. I am deeply grateful for her patience and for how she kept pushing me to think differently.

I also remember getting my first rejection. Two seconds later, I got a message from her: “I’m sorry about the paper.” Something clicked in that moment. She was not my boss; she was my mentor.

“Your ideas are like your children, and you don’t want them to go into the world in rags.” — Patrick Winston

Rejection is hard because our ideas are our children. But eventually I realized the sting was not just “they said no.” It was having to look at my work with fewer illusions. What was the core claim, really? What was the clean story? What would a skeptical reviewer misunderstand, and why might that be my fault? Each rejection pushed me to tighten the logic, cut the noise, and explain the contribution more clearly. In that sense, reviews became less of a verdict and more of a mirror.

So when the paper was finally accepted, I was genuinely happy but not surprised. By then, we had stress-tested the work enough that acceptance felt like the outcome finally catching up with the paper we had fought to make real.

I also learned not to over-read any single decision. Review is noisy, and with LLMs entering the workflow, that noise can feel even louder. A rejection does not automatically mean the work is bad. Maybe the fit was wrong, the framing did not land, or the message got lost. The part you can control is your trajectory: keep learning, keep revising, and keep making the work clearer and stronger.

Still enjoying my solitude

My life has become much more colorful since I joined Princeton. I have made new friends and picked up new hobbies. But one thing has stayed the same: people may worry that I am lonely, while I worry much more about someone getting too far into my life.

I am often alone but never lonely. I love jogging around Lake Carnegie and along the Delaware Canal towpath, where there are plenty of 🦊s and 🦌s. I love walking from my apartment to my office in the morning and walking back alone at night. I even love standing by Lake Carnegie and letting the sun hit my face.

Lake Carnegie day and night, where I often go 🏃‍♂️ and 🚶 alone.

Being alone gives me room to think and decompress. It is hard for some people around me to understand, my mom included, but solitude feels like freedom and control over my own life. At the end of the day, life is a journey you take alone whether you like it or not. If you have not found joy in solitude, I hope you find your own version of it, even in small doses.

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

PS: I have also learned that, as I get older, the way I treat friends, especially female friends, can be misunderstood. So I have become more deliberate about keeping some space and setting boundaries.

Finding meaning in a PhD (and in life)

To me, doing a PhD somewhere like Princeton is an absolute privilege. It gives me time and space to think about what I really want, what I am good at, and what I am not. For me, a PhD is not mainly about innovation, “moving the needle,” or advancing humanity. It is about understanding: understanding science and, maybe most importantly, understanding life.

Thanks to fellowship support, I got to organize a book club in the CS department, where we read and discuss one book every month.

Since coming to Princeton, I have started reading physical books again. A good friend introduced me to Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and I got hooked. It is about formal logic and its connections to math, art, and thinking. The idea that grabbed me was that mathematical and logical symbols have no inherent meaning. But once we give them meaning, they can express all of mathematics and more.

That got me thinking: why should life be any different? We have moved past the simple search for our next meal or the drive to reproduce. I do not think life comes with one inherent, predetermined meaning. We have to give meaning to the world around us ourselves.

Life is hard. It comes with obstacles and all kinds of internal and external struggles. If we do not give it meaning, what is the point of being here and going through all of it?

I picked up the violin again after a long hiatus. It’s become a simple way to reconnect with myself.

A few final thoughts

My first year was full of joy and rejection, and I loved it. I came to understand both my research and myself much better. I am grateful to Princeton for giving me a safe, peaceful place to think. I am equally grateful to my advisor and friends for creating such a supportive, intellectually stimulating environment.

My research group (NetΣyn) at Princeton. The third person from the right is my advisor, and the rest are my amazing labmates.

AI is upending the world as we know it, but an ivory tower like Princeton has shielded us from much of that chaos. It gives us time to look inward instead of constantly worrying about where the world is heading. We will all have to face that chaos eventually; for now, I cherish this space.

When I am old and no longer as active, I hope to have a rich memory book full of beautiful moments to flip through, not just a dense CV. Life is not a race to the finish line or a matter of grinding through daily motions. I have come to think it is not really about the process or the destination. It is about understanding who we are and who we become along the way.

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