Last week was the end of a somewhat long period of writing: two months in which I almost didn’t do any new research. The last thing I had to do was preparing the final version for the ACC’09 papers.
I start with the easy one, as opposed to the difficult one. First thing in the morning I read the paper again. I don’t like it. If I were to write it again, I’d write it in a completely different way. I read the reviews, and it seems that the reviewers liked it more than I like it now. The interesting thing is that I realize this is a case of cognitive dissonance, because when I read the reviews for the first time a couple of months ago, I had the impression they were particularly harsh. Instead they are quite reasonable and helpful.
I blame it on the typical emotional roller-coaster for research, which is conveniently summarized below:
The emotional roller-coaster for engineering papers
- T0, idea: this is so cool!
- T0 + 1 month, implementation: wait, it’s not that cool!
- T0 + 2 months, writing: yeah, it’s cool enough!
- T0 + 3 months, deadline: enough with this stuff!
- T0 + 3 months + 1, the day after the deadline: my best paper ever!
- T0 + 6 months, reading the reviews: nobody understands me!
- T0 + 8 months, preparing the final version: this paper sucks, let me rewrite it from scratch!
- T0 + 10 months, conference presentation: how can I fake excitement for an idea I had 1 year ago?
- T0 + 1 year, considering writing a journal version: I don’t have time for this old stuff, let’s do something new!
- T0 + 2 years, casually opening the PDF: that’s really cool! did I write that?!
This is specific to engineering, as science and math have very different psychology. Hopefully I will be doing a bit of biology in the near future, and so I’ll be able to report the differences. For sure, it will not take just 3 months from the idea to the writing.