2019 Year-End Summary and 2020 New Year Outlook
2020 is destined to be an unusual year for me, mainly because I am facing the two gates of graduation and job hunting. This is the most important challenge and task I have faced in the past two years. I have prepared for it for a long time, hoping that all the accumulation would finally pay off. Reality, however, did not go as I wished.
Review of 2019
In last year’s plan, I wrote down my plans and expectations for 2019.
I overfulfilled my LeetCode practice goal. I have now solved 800+ problems.
For C++, although I did not finish C++ Primer as expected, I basically finished the Effective C++ series and The C++ Standard Library. C++ has become my main language. Recently I have been playing with Rust. After learning C++, learning Rust has many benefits, because the two share a lot in common. But this round of tinkering is more interest-driven and will not change C++’s status as my main language.
I basically finished Cracking the Coding Interview (CTCI).
There was almost no progress on other books. I feel guilty about that.
As for actual interviews, in March I interviewed for a backend development internship in ByteDance’s Ads system, but did not pass because of the internship timing. At the end of August, I attended the one-week engineering track of ByteDance’s summer camp. For that summer camp, I only took the written test in June; because the written test score was decent, the interview was waived. In November I received an invitation to A Day with Google, but since I was already in Belgium, of course I could not attend. What a pity.
Internships at major companies remained zero. In the first half of the year, I interned at SenseTime for half a year and got some technical training. Overall, however, I was not very satisfied. First, the internship had a negative effect on my research topic, and I did not balance the two as I had expected. Second, I was not very satisfied with SenseTime’s environment. Its research strength is well recognized in the industry, but its engineering capability is really average, and internal project management is quite chaotic. Finally, SenseTime itself is a mid-sized company. In scale, product, and technology, it is one level behind Kuaishou.
In terms of fitness, instead of moving forward, I regressed. I bought a gym membership, but only went about 20 times in the whole year.
Last year’s OKR completion rate was about 60%.
During the year, I also discovered some obvious shortcomings in myself:
Learning Detached From Social Interaction
Because my family environment is generally introverted, and because of the family motto that “all pursuits are inferior; only study is noble”, I have long developed the habit of thinking and studying independently. In the past this did not look like a weakness. It even looked like a strength, because I could draw more power from within. However, at the graduate stage, it has become a big problem. Graduate school is different from before. You do not need to deliberately seek social interaction for studying, but you also will not be excessively detached from it. The classmates around you generally study similar content and face similar requirements, so communication with each other becomes unavoidable. But now, especially after the first year of graduate school, there are not even courses anymore, only research tasks. My research topic is also something only I am working on. Previously many people in the lab worked on it, at most four people, enough to form a small topic group. But recently those who left have left, and those who graduated have graduated. Only I remain, struggling alone. If I do not seek social help, there really is no one to communicate with me.
The downsides of being detached from social interaction are obvious. I often take a strange path and go farther and farther down the wrong road; I do not receive emotional support or technical support; laziness and withdrawal get amplified.
Feasible solutions:
Whether for job hunting or research, communicate more with classmates. Although everyone’s research topics are different, they can still provide basic emotional support and technical advice.
At work, communicate more with my advisor. I personally communicate very little with teachers, thanks to the fear of teachers I developed when I was young. Although university teachers are very different from earlier teachers, and to a large extent are both teachers and friends, the shadow of being physically punished by teachers in elementary and middle school has never gone away. It has become a psychological barrier in my communication with my advisor.
Increase my desire and experience in communication. Previously, in interactions with people, my principle was: say as little as possible, and keep relationships from going any further if possible. It is time for that principle to change. My goal is to maintain a large circle of ordinary friends, at least 50 people, including both people I already knew and new people I meet this year. The standard is cumulative communication time of more than one hour in a year, or more than 50 WeChat messages.
Hopes for a Better Life in 2020
Continue to focus on graduation and job hunting. Both hands must grasp, and both hands must be strong.
- Keep solving problems every day, cultivate problem-solving feel, bug-free ability, and debug ability. This year I hope to conquer hard problems, and solve most hard problems within half an hour.
- Internship at a major company. Prepare seriously for summer internship interviews and complete what may be the last internship of my life with high quality. The targets are foreign companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Hulu.
- Job hunting and interview preparation. During fall recruiting, find a satisfying job and secure a decent bowl of rice.
- Complete the graduation design and my advisor’s requirements, and absolutely do not delay graduation. At the moment it looks like I may need to extend by half a year. This should also be the last research period of my life.
- Fitness. I hope to look slim in clothes and muscular without them. Increase my weight to 70 kg. Extract the remaining three wisdom teeth, and crown the lower-right molar.