Prelude

When I first started this blog (unpublished), I was very much busy brooding in Brooklyn, and now I just don’t feel like changing the domain name, so we will have to live with it.

I have spent the better half of my 20s pondering my academic goals, my career, and my my life trajectory. When I first started this blog, I was taking NLP classes remotely from Bushwick and deciding that I wanted to apply to Udub’s Computational Linguistics M.S. I now write this from Seattle.

The funny thing about a target is that it often moves. What started as a desire to desperately graduate college with a job, work hard and pivot fast turned into a desire to slow down and learn, refocus my skills onto something impactful, and fill the void created by a corporate America that demanded more from me than it gave back. Most of my industry experience has been in outbound Product Management, which I recently learned is what product marketing is being repackaged as to appeal to male egos LOL. While I have discovered that I can be pretty good at talking to customers, writing technical case studies, and launching products from 0 to 1, I also discovered that I’m just not really passionate about promoting GPT wrappers that claim to “streamline workflows,” “provide a unified source of truth,” or “allow teams to effortlessly deploy at scale,” no matter how many proverbial carrots are dangled at me.

I can’t believe I’m quoting Jeff Bezos here, but I guess that happens when you live in Seattle. In his 2020 book, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, Bezos describes two types of failure: experimental failure and operational failure. To put it simply, experimental failure is when you try something new and fail. Operational failure is when you know how to do something well and fail to execute. Experimental failure is permissible as long as you learn from your mistakes, while operational failure is something that could have (and should have) been avoided.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: my venture into research is an experimental manifestation of my new goal to learn, drive change, and find the fulfillment I could not find in Product work. In this world marred by TRADED for $100M infographics, we only see what worked and we rarely discuss what didn’t. In this blog, I hope to write about the failures of my research journey, what I learn in the process, and what I still hope to learn. Thanks for following along!