Reflection #6

Talks

I gave two course talks recently. One is about Julia, and the other one is about DeepSpeed. In James Mickens’ speech, he mentioned that the speaker should be interesting in the first two pages of their talk. I took his advice and added a joke on the second page of both talks. I don’t know how it works for the audience, but at least I feel more relieved during the talk.

It wasn’t until the second talk ended that I realized it’s a little bit hard for me to say “I don’t know” when I was on the podium. When someone asked a question and I didn’t know the answer, I just said random stuff or not answering accordingly, hoping they wouldn’t follow up. After then, I started thinking why I have this behavior. I’ve seen professors often said they don’t know about something during lectures. What stopped me to admit that I don’t know？ Why I want to look like knowing everything?

This is a great question for me to think about during workouts.

I also had a call with my future internship manager. He is really nice, but I felt a little bit unconfident when he asked about my technical backgrounds. I was worried about if I say I was at 80 out of 100, but ended up delivering only 60. But he encouraged me to deliver my best, which reassured me and made me working on shifting my mindset from perfectionism to simply doing my best.

New look

Went to take photos for my internship badge last week.

Friends helped edit it a bit.

Looks nice!

Anxiety

I find it hard to accept when things don’t follow my plan. I don’t usually plan many things, which makes it even harder for me to accept when things go wrong, and it makes me anxious.

But the best and maybe the only way is to accept it. After all, I can’t plan and predict everything.

It reminds me of my Facebook motto. “The beauty of life is not in getting what we want, but in the surprises along the way.”