[blacksoil]

I was thinking of getting a PhD 4 years ago. I applied and got accepted to CMU master's program in robotic vision. I planned to go through the program and worked my way to get into a good PhD program because I didn't have enough credential to apply directly to good PhD programs. After thinking through it, I decided not to even do the master's.

Throughout my thinking process, I spent everyday and lots of weekends sitting at coffee shops crunching through research papers. And what I found was that a lot of of the papers were not directly relevant to the industries, it's just like what somebody said in the comments: a lot of research projects are like trying to hammer a square peg into a circle hole. I'm sure some of them will make great impact. For example, the research about neural network had been done since the 80s, it just happens to take off nowadays because computers back then weren't good enough. But when I asked myself: "What am I really looking for?" I realized that I wanted to work on something that makes an immediate impact. Especially because I grew up and raised in a developing country, a lot of problems here are super immediate. (i.e. poverty, hunger, lack of educations, etc) As so much as I'm genuinely curious and interested in many of the research topics, I realized that my stamina didn't lie in curiosity and interest alone, but more in the immediate impact I'm making. For example, I learned that I'm much more fulfilled to work on something super practical and can be immediately useful to people.

Even though I didn't end up doing a PhD, I still occasionally spend my time reading conference papers. My curiosity and interest are pretty much satisfied through that. I'm much more interested in exploring interesting applications of such ingenious research rather than doing going super deep in a particular topic and be the one doing the research. Magic Pony Technology is one of the companies I look up to. I think it's a brilliant way of turning research into something practical