The price of flying from Guangzhou to Shanghai has become so expensive after the pandemic ended - back in 2022 it’s like about 600 rmb and now it’s 1200 (same airline company, almost equivalent time and and booking time). And the plane procrastinate as well! The one that I’m on today is delayed for half an hour, which is rare and annoying. But good news is that people on this plane is majorly flying business. No crying babies, that’s nice though.
Anyway, no Wifi and stuck in the air, it’s an excellent time to meditate and reflect a little - about what’s next. In the upcoming 16-week semester I’m doing my third year undergrad study and this period is vital - starting to do something and dive in the field that I love. It takes me two years from declaring a general intention of doing a PhD to finally confirming my mind and commit to the idea.
The strategy would be different. Before I have a more explorative style in terms of academic - I attend a lot of lectures and read whatever materials that might be potentially interesting. It kinda resembles to a notion in reinforcement learning - on the earlier phase of training the algorithm (objective) is set to prefer more evenly distributed actions (higher probability entropy), resulting in more explorative actions. But this semester I will be more focused, on computational economic and mechanism design.
Wait and see! Like after two or three weeks I’ll start rubbishing it, and that’s the sign of getting on track.
Btw, got a new friend to travel with me (on the left is two years ago, right is today).
