Original post: https://jetnew.io/blog/2021/100-lessons/

About these Lessons

I'm an undergraduate from the National University of Singapore. I researched reinforcement learning for a full year, including full-time over winter and summer breaks, as part of an undergraduate research programme. I faced many uncertainties and difficulties while doing research over the year, and deliberated over choosing to spending time on research versus on industry-relevant skills.

This blog post condenses all the hard-earned lessons I've learnt after stumbling through mistakes and picking myself up again. After 1 year of research, I believe that my decision to spend 1 year’s worth of time on research was well worth it, purely from my takeaways, even though I ended up without a publication that I desired so much at the start of my journey. In writing this post, I hope that fellow researchers that face related challenges about research can learn without going through the hard way, and I believe that this post will be helpful to refer back to when stuck on various difficulties related to research.

This post is structured by lessons on:

1. Research - Insights about research methodology
2. Learning - Reflections about learning effectively
3. Reinforcement Learning - Difficulties I faced with my research topic
4. Workflow - Hard-earned lessons that incurred significant costs
5. Motivation - Introspections about how to advance myself sustainably
6. Support - Acknowledgements for the social structures that enabled me
7. Mindset - Hard-earned lessons about life that I learnt from research

Each lesson consists of an advice, a brief explanation and the lesson through which I learnt it.

I would like to thank my research advisor Prof. Harold Soh from the Collaborative, Learning and Adaptive Robots (CLeAR) Lab at NUS for his mentorship, my seniors in the lab Bingcai and Kaiqi for their advice, my close friends Shiying, Jun Jie, Wai Ching, Ming Liang and Liying for their support, and many other people who have influenced and helped me in this short but memorable 1-year journey.

I am also looking for a research internship in 2022, ideally reinforcement learning; please let me know if you are recruiting!

Research

1. The problem statement is the most important thing in research because without one, there's no real need for the research idea.
2. Develop a long-term vision of your research direction to avoid tunnel-visioning into a few specific lines of research.
3. Reflect on the significance of problems that papers aim to address as there exists papers that explore ideas without addressing a real problem.
4. When reading papers, reflect about the magnitude of improvement made towards addressing the targeted problem.