Back when i was really trying to get something to pay my rent as a broke freshman (still am), i went on asu's job portal hunting for jobs. weeks went by and i was just out of luck. one day i randomly saw one of those ASU newsletters, this one about a Minecraft simulation study in risk simulations -- basically investigating how humans behave in rescue scenarios, using minecraft as a simulation game for inferring behaviors relatable to real life. it looked cool. the email was meant as a marketing blast, but i still sent a note to the program head mentioning my interest and some of my highschool extracurricular BS. i ended up getting on a call with them! obviously i didn't get a job right away, so i started volunteering there. i was excited though, i started going to asu's poly campus, super chill place.
It's called GHOST lab, under CHART ASIST. their study was basically done for the semester, but they still let me into the lab to play around and figure out any research direction i wanted to go into.
I think that independence to explore ideas was really where i actually got into research. up until this point i was just about getting a project shipped: look up deadlines, ship, and boom, move on. but research was different. it actually required more thinking than i realized. the whole concept of a literature review was so bizarre to me at first -- i have to look at what already exists? well there's about a trillion papers out there, so whatever i do must already exist, no? then what's the point of building it?
that's where i realized nothing is 100% perfect or absolute. everything has a weakness, and research is all about studying the environment, finding problems, and proposing solutions. this was a mindset shift for me.
Since i was getting handy with my harness, a natural direction became learning about LLMs. still clueless, but reading anyway -- random papers on LLMs, their attention mechanisms, etc.
I started making notes of what i read, and it was really something. even though i was clueless, the things i read helped me connect dots, i realize now. i have bits of knowledge from everywhere, enough to connect the patterns when they matter during ideation or when understanding something new.
Yeah, that's a lot of papers. i was essentially following this list. i was doing these extra things out of imposter syndrome, now that i think about it -- it wasn't purely interest or curiosity, it felt like i had to prove myself or become better than my average. a byproduct of the excessive self-improvement content i consumed in highschool. i think it also made me worse at being present in the moment and absorbing what's actually there, and what i really want to do.
At ghost lab, i enjoyed experimenting with multimodal LLMs. the gemini live api was a new thing then, so i was essentially converting video data into structured, cleaned, labeled data. i also learnt about turtlebots and how they operated, and how LiDARs worked.
I enjoyed reading papers there on why path planning is so hard.
But anyway, that one meeting with my mentor at GHOST lab really changed my mindset: research isn't about building and shipping new solutions out there, it's more a way of understanding things, studying them, and exploring the curiosity behind the whys.
That's when i realized a lot of my earlier building had been without a clue, or without direction.
hard work with no direction takes you nowhere -- that's the notion i had missed.
from that point on i started narrowing down the things i really found interesting or would want to do, with no pressure or care for how people might perceive me.
and honestly i'm still figuring out what my research identity really is. i learnt that i can only tell once i'm deep in at least one domain, rather than spreading myself across too many things and half-assing all of them.
This also made me reflect on my efforts outside research -- my day-to-day, where i spent time, and where it actually mattered.
I think it just snapped me back to reality and made me feel more in control of myself. more grounded, perhaps.
And then one day, my other mentor from RISE lab came in to present their project, and that's when i officially got into a lab @ FURI.