Time Management

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

My self-analysis

Here is the rock-hard truth as a result of self-analysis of my life so far:

I am lazy!

Well, that’s my weakness rooted in my genes, kind like the animal behaviours driven by genetics rather than rational, logical decisions by my brain. Can’t deny it. Here is a list:

I prefer to stay in my comfort zone (like being single 😞);
I have also filled my to-do list on Gist or wunderlust, and didn’t finish them;
I have interests in a lot of things, then passion fades away and I turn to new things;
I will first exhaust the interesting videos on Bilibili beforing starting to do my work;
Is there any updates on my favourite sports teams and players? Let me check it out first;
My record for The Legend of Heroes series reached 1000+ hrs. My, my, my…

Sometimes I wonder how I have not been ruled out by the law of evolution.

What Leads to This

The traditional education, culture and beliefs shared among Chinese value hard-working as a virtue. I identify myself sharing these values, and I really feel guilty being lazy.

However, I’m also influenced by other perspectives and by my personal experiences as well, which partly changed my view on hard-working in an unnoticed way, at least that’s what I thought.

Personal Experience

First, since the first day attending the school, I don’t find it difficult to be one of the top students in most subjects without much effort. This might lead to the idea that being smart is an advantage I could take to compensate for the efforts I didn’t pay as others did. I didn’t have much failures during my student days.

But as over-protected organisms will be more sensitive to infections, failures or obstacles strike harder on me when they come. When I was fortunate enough (long story short here) to enter Fudan University, which is among top three university in China, I find it difficult to survive by continuing taking advantage of my little wit and not taking much effort. This is because my classmates are all smart like hell. Different from the high school where a stringent and established system that can push you foward, the life in university is more about self-management which I was not good at.¹ As a result, my studies were not so good in the first year (GPA 2.98, I vividly remember). Later I slowly accepted this, put some effort in it, and finally ended now at Columbia.

Until now, it might become a habit of me to utilize my small wit for not working hard.

Misintepreted Readings

Second, I read a lot when I could. I ran into multiple interesting articles arguing that being lazy is a virtue, because:

Most inventions came into being because the inventors’ initial motive is to save time and effort.
In order to save time for being lazy, smart people tend to use innovative ways to solve problems and do the work.

Well, that convinced me to keep being lazy. But it turned out I confused this type of lazy with procrastinating, which is just doing-nothing-to-evade-real-life-problems kind of lazy.

Beliefs

Finally, It’s more of a existential crisis of mine in my early 20s, wondering if anything has a meaning. Humans cannot choose whether to enter this world, and cannot choose whether to exit this world as well. A thought like this could make me depressed sometimes, which further leads to a questioning of the meaning of what I have done.

My statistics training at Columbia gives me a conception that there always exists some sense of randomness for which I don’t have any control. My undergradute major in medicine also leads to my acknowlodgement that our brain is easily affected by hormones and all the emotions, motivations, ambitions, decisions, love and personalities are affected by them. In short, most things we do are to serve the reward circuit in our brain in exchange for some dopamine, in another word, happiness. ~~So why not just enjoy being lazy?~~

What to Do About My Laziness

There are many instructions out in the wild. But I doubt their effiacy. Maybe the biggest difficulty is to take better control of myself, I’ll list a few:

Do regular exercises.
Read.
Write.
Do the honest work I’m supposed to do.
Fuck it, I’m doing what I want to do and get paid for it, what else should I expect.

Is life REALLY just…random?

comic from xkcd.

I am not as well, currently ^{^}

In Search of Lost Time: 2017

Thu, 28 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

2017 will gone, and I didn’t even have time to write one single blog post. An obvious inference should be, 2017 doesn’t exist…

2017 was a year of struggle for me as a biostatistics master student. I spent most time at school learning statistical theories, which sometimes drove me nuts as I came from pure medical background. I do achieve excellent grades (straight A+) for my courses. But, are the proofs and derivations useful for my future career? It is not a silly question. Lots of my peers also feel the crunch.

Therefore, in 2017, I

learned some Python,
read R for Data Science from cover to cover 3 times,
employed tidyverse packages for my projects (ggplot, dplyr, purrr for analysis and R Markdown, xaringan for communication),
learned some concepts of machine learning through the online courses and the reader-friendly textbook,
learned some more concepts of machine learning through the classic textbook and
didn’t write one single blog post, because all my spare time and coffee making time were simply run out.

I feel much better after one year of burying my head in the sand. Keep tuned, 2018.

Welcome to Jiayi’s website

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

So, you want start a personal website? And you are also an R user? Then the R package blogdown is the best (state-of-the-art) way to create a static website that is generated using RStudio.

My website is powered by the academic theme for Hugo, a perfect theme for personal or academic websites, and is hosted on Netlify. For more details on how to build the website through the awesome blogdown R package, please check out my step-by-step tutorial in my github repository. Feel free to contact me if you have questions.

I will primarily use the website to share my projects and publications, as well as posts mostly related to data science and biostatistics.

New blog post: "Advice to aspiring data scientists: start a blog" https://t.co/yMDHqviiBN #rstats pic.twitter.com/9AdPUdbjtE
— David Robinson (@drob) November 14, 2017

As an aspiring data scientist, now it’s time to blog!

Posts on Jiayi Ji