I have a close-to-infinite list of unanswered emails in my inbox. As Paul Graham suggests, some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). I wonder how many friends that’ll cost me… I have been, actually, following Paul’s advise for the good part of my life. I tend to set aside “less important things” in favor of devoting all my time to “more important things.” It happens, that most of the time I am very preoccupied with one of these “more important things” - like studying, doing research, and applying to PhD programs, most of which are way out of my league. Naturally, replying to my friends’ emails, reading the novels from my long list of “things to enjoy,” going to the gym and running more than once a month - all that usually goes down the drain with lots of other “less important stuff.” Is it worth it? I had better be winning the Nobel prize some time soon to justify all these sacrifices…

My friends to whom I haven’t replied in ages: I apologize. I have been racing against time this semester: I was busy applying to doctoral programs. Filling out an application form is relatively easy. Having some research experience and interesting ideas to back your personal statement is the tough one. Research becomes possible once you have the programming and theoretical background, so learning this or that language/framework/approach changes from being the goal to being only the means to something by far more complicated and time consuming. The second requirement is interesting ideas. These come (as they tell me) after A LOT of thinking about your subject. You think about it day and night - and eventually they may come. Chances are, they won’t. But if you don’t even try - they never will. No, I’m not complaining - it’s all fun… but it can take all your time - what happens to me too often.

No great ideas so far. However, for those who are interested, here’s part of my research statement …which I have to post as a separate entry. It appears that when I coded my blog software, I didn’t anticipate entries longer than 8000 characters. Whoops… How embarassing… Must recode.