Research — I Like Questions That Don't Already Have Answers

Research has become another major interest of mine because it’s very different from normal schoolwork.

In school, most questions already have answers. The teacher knows the answer. The textbook knows the answer. Usually, I’m trying to figure out whether I know the answer.

Research feels different.

You can start with:

“I don’t know.”

And that’s completely okay.

My research experiences have included using CNNs with satellite imagery for poverty prediction and LSTMs for market forecasting. Both eventually led to conference presentations and published papers.

Of course I’m proud of getting research published, but what interests me more is everything that happens before the finished paper.

You start with a question.

You find data.

You realize the data isn’t as simple as you thought.

You build something.

It doesn’t work.

You change something.

Now something else doesn’t work.

Eventually you get a result, and then you have another problem:

What does this result actually mean?

Research has made me realize that not knowing something isn’t necessarily a weakness.

Sometimes “I don’t know” is the beginning of something interesting.

That’s the part I want to keep exploring.

I don’t want my education to only be about learning answers other people already discovered. Eventually, I want to understand things deeply enough that I can start asking some of my own questions.

I like taking something I don’t understand and slowly figuring out how I could find an answer.