2025 Reflections
Reflections on my research and experiences during the first research year of the Interactive AI CDT
2025 Reflections
After writing the 2024 summer project reflections, I found that analysing a year with the blessing of hindsight helps a lot in future planning. While I felt I had covered all bases with the ‘lessons learnt’ discussion of 2024, what I really did was identify ways to delay an inevitable burnout.
The reflections of 2025 are mainly on a largely unsuccessful attempt to avoid burnout, leading to a relatively unproductive year overall; however, this year also set me up for what seems to be my most successful year, both within research and personally, so far. The following sections will highlight the horrific burnout, the slow recovery, and how I managed to use these experiences to improve my research; hopefully this will serve to help other PhD students avoid the same mistakes, or at least as a fun read for myself if I don’t learn anything from the last year.
Before I begin, I should note that those around me had a few _‘I told you so’ moments post-burnout, so the best advice is to listen to your colleagues and friends to avoid this._
This will be slowly written up, so please be patient.