Ph.D. Graduation Speech

The Department of Statistics at the University of Washington held its commencement ceremony for the 2023-2024 academic year on June 7, 2024. I was nominated by the Ph.D. students to give a speech at the ceremony. You can find the speech here. Here is the transcript:

Looking behind at 2022 and looking ahead at 2023

Since starting in 2016 over the winter break of my first year as an undergrad, this annual retrospective seems to be the onlt thing keeping this blog alive. I do ocassionally write some guides, but nothing for the blog itself. I hope to add more to the blog but, right now, I don’t have a timeline for that. In the meantime, I intend to keep the tradition of these annual round-ups of the past year.

Looking Behind and Looking Ahead: 2021 and 2022

Here it is: the annual retrospection for 2021.

I started writing this on January 6, 2022. And this was sitting in my drafts for almost 2 months. Don’t ask why.

Looking back on 2020

2020 was an interesting year to say the least. You’ve probably heard it phrased a dozen different ways from a gross number of people. So I won’t try to describe it more, except that I’ll use it as an excuse for being 3 months late. It’s also an excuse for why I won’t do the usual by the numbers format I did the last two years.

This time, I’ll just list the highlights (ups and downs) of the past year, and the things I’m looking forward to this year.

Identifying the Why

The why is one of the most difficult introspective questions to answer. There are different why’s in life. Why is my current life this way? Why is my ideal life that way? Why is there a difference between the two? These are difficult questions to answer because they are broad, abstract, and often have no one right answer. After spending a good amount of time thinking, in this article, I try to develop a framework for approaching these questions.

Why more time?

Almost everyone at some point in their life has the thought, “I wish I had more time” or something along those lines. Often, we miss the larger question lurking behind this thought – “Why do I want more time?” This question aims to isolate the real life from the ideal life. The real life is the present – the one we are in right now. The ideal life is the life that we wish we were living.

On Stoicism

Stoicism refers to a philosophy of life, and a Stoic is someone who lives by this philosophy. This is not to be confused with stoicism (with a lowercase ‘s’), which means “suppressing happiness, pain, and emotions in general” in the modern sense. I like to think of myself as an aspiring Stoic. I try to embody this philosophy, but currently do so imperfectly. In this post, I share my understanding of Stoicism and thoughts about about how it has been helpful to me.