Inspired by Rachit Nigam's post concerning his first two years of his PhD program in computer science at Cornell, I thought I'd post my own short summary of my time at the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Like Rachit, I will start out with a list of successes and failures. They are in approximately chronological order.
Fall 2018 was the beginning of my PhD, moving to Austin, and getting settled into my apartment. Most of this semester was spent buying furniture, slowly making my apartment look like a livable space, and attending my graduate courses. I started a couple of projects. I went to my favorite bodega quite a bit, Speedway Market. I think it is still my favorite bodega of all time, sorry Rio Mart.
I bought a record player and watched a lot of local news, and also every UT football game.
Realized I was not happy living in my apartment. Too much alone time, not enough social interaction. So, I applied to live in both of the major coop systems in the Austin area, College Houses and ICC. I got into both, and decided that ICC fit my needs better. Visited three of the houses that were known to be graduate student-centric and picked French House. Despite the negative reputation it had at the time (there were quite a few interpersonal issues that were no longer in play by the time I moved in), I think that this was still the right choice.
I had a very relaxed class schedule this semester, so I bought a bike and biked at the Veloway nearly every day to every other day. I trained so much that I was able to complete a metric century (63 miles = 100km) in early June. I also rode in a couple other rides throughout Texas, ranging from 37 to 45 miles apiece. This was perhaps the best shape I ever was in my life. I hope to be able to get back to this same level or perhaps complete a true 100 mile century once the pandemic is over and I am able to go back to Texas.
I applied and was admitted to Carnegie Mellon's LearnLan summer school, which was a great experience, which I would highly recommend to other early-career learning science researchers.
This semester was also notable because I was able to finally publish my undergraduate thesis in the journal Memory, which was my first publication and also my first first-author publication.
Perhaps the biggest highlight of Fall 2019 was teaching my first college class at the age of 23. It felt weird to teach students who were potentially only ~ 18 months younger than me, but this feeling quickly went away. Overall, I really enjoyed teaching EDP 304, "Strategic Learning for the 21st Century", despite the fact that the "21st Century" designation really hasn't aged well (we're 20 years in -- isn't all learning for the 21st century at this point?). My course reviews were good, but this experience also solidified my feelings that I will not enter teaching as my primary occupation. I could see this feeling changing if I were able to teach a more advanced class or at least a syllabus of my own design.
In Fall 2019, I continued projects concerning the interleaving and testing effects. I also started a new project concerning the motivational consequences of task difficulty. I am still analyzing most of this data, but the interleaving research looks the most promising. The task difficulty idea was a good start, but considering it's a very experimental area of research it is not particularly surprising that the design needed a couple substantial tweaks in order to better test my hypotheses. I also wrote my NSF GRFP application during the Fall. Although I had written a draft early on in the semester, two weeks before the deadline I showed it to my friend and GRFP-awardee, Raphael, and he gave me some superb advice on how to significantly improve the application. I took this advice, but it did require me to begrudgingly overhaul all five pags of single-spaced application materials. Ultimately, I am proud of the application I put together.
With regards to my coursework, I took a very interesting assortment of clases: Research Methods in Psychology and Education; Correlation and Regression; and Science and Metaphysics. The first two courses, both in the Educational Psychology department, gave me a much enhanced understanding of research design and regression analysis, respectively. Although I had a good lay understanding of linear regression before my coursework, this class gave me a much better understanding of the nuances of commonly used statistical tools.
Science and Metaphysics was a unique course for me because it was housed in the Philosophy department and definitely not tailored towards philosophical novices. I was the only person in this 10-student seminar that was not pursuing a PhD in philosophy, and I felt it. This is not to say that it was a bad experience. In fact, it was great. I got to read about DAGs and also the philosophical views of causation. Admittedly, I ended up taking this course P/F, but I had enjoyed the exposure to a totally different discipline and entirely new mode of argumentation/evidence.
This was also my first semester in French House, where I made quite a few friends in Austin (Kevin, James, Oscar, Johnny). Actually, really I met my first friends outside of my program and outside of the people I met at Dartmouth or prior to moving to Austin.
On the plus side, I took one of my favorite classes in my academic career thus far, Causal Inference. This class totally redefined how I understood statistics. In particular, the notion of using advanced regression techniques to estimate quantities of interest and permutation/bootstrapping was incredibly helpful.
Unfortunately, my progress on understanding statistics was undermined by just one (nano-sized) thing.
And that thing? What a shitshow. A pandemic!
Half a semester online. I taught two more sections of EDP 304, but the extreme disruption of the semester meant that it was no longer nearly as fulfilling as the Fall 2018 semester. Left the coop and went home to Pennslyvania. When I went home to Pennsylvania, I thought I would be back to Austin by the fall, but this turned out to be an extreme underestimate. Still there as of October 2020, and no idea when I'll be back.