I joined two labs in the CS part of our department, including 2 years in Hung-Yu Wei’s Wireless Mobile Network Lab and 1 year in Polly Huang’s Network and Systems Lab. I published one IEEE conference paper and one IEEE transactions paper related to game theory and resource allocation in wireless communication as the first author in Hung-Yu Wei’s lab. This kind of output is pretty impressive for an undergrad, but unfortunately, all the work is extremely worthless. I learned almost nothing apart from how to publish an academic paper and the academic gained nothing from my “contribution” either.

Why join a lab

Most of the students in our EE & CS departments would start joining labs around the Junior year, some sooner and some later. The typical trajectory of the students in these two departments is either pursuing a Master’s degree in our school or in the US. Some students would start working right away after graduating, typically in the Taiwan branch of some big US tech companies or a HFT firm, but they are the minority.

There are benefits to joining labs for either choice. For those intending to pursue a Master’s in our school, they can continue their research in the same lab under the same professor in grad school (since all our grad programs are thesis-based). Combined with the fact that you can take a lot of graduate courses during college years, which can be counted in the graduation requirement in grad school, you can have an easier time when pursuing a Master’s degree. And for those intending to go to a top school in the US, having some papers under your name helps a lot.

I belonged to the latter group initially. Since my 1st internship, I found myself more interested in software engineering, so I wanted to get a Master’s degree in Computer Science in the US.

The start

I joined the game theory group of Hung-Yu Wei’s Wireless Mobile Network Lab in the first semester of my Junior year, and I was pretty disappointed. I only got to do some arbitrary “research” on irrelevant topics, and only met the professor in person like twice. So in the next semester, I joined Polly Huang’s Network and Systems Lab. Unfortunately, tho not arbitrary, the work they were doing in the lab was really stupid in my eye.

In the summer vacation before my last year in college, things changed. I switched to the systems group under Hung-Yu Wei from the game theory group because I wanted to do some real meaningful work. However, Yao Chiang, the leader of the group, decided to push me to publish a conference paper after learning that I wanted to apply to US grad schools. We then started to cook.

Publishing a conference paper

Under his guidance, I transformed my existing research in the game theory group to production-ready by extending it and filling some holes. I started to write my first conference paper in September 2022, finished it in one week, and then submitted it to the IEEE Conference on Wireless Communications and Networking (WCNC). I got the acceptance email when Argentina and the Netherlands were heading into extra time in the World Cup in December 2022.

Since I got into the systems group, I had been in a very bizarre position where I still joined the weekly group meeting and reported my progress while still doing the game theory stuff.

I went to Glasgow in March 2023 to participate and present at the conference. I learned exactly nothing academically speaking as expected but outside of that, it was a blast.

During 2022 fall I was still in Polly’s lab doing some insignificant stupid work. I just couldn’t vibe with the professor, and that was my last semester in the lab.

Publishing a journal paper

For half of a year after my WCNC submission, I had pretty much zero progress in terms of my research because for the first 3 months, I was busily leetcoding, connecting randos on LinkedIn for referrals, and mass applying to US companies aside from my regular internship and school works. For the latter 3 months, since I already got two offers (not great ones but still better than spending 100k on a US grad school), I had zero incentive to continue my research. I was still slowly making some effort to extend my model tho.

Two months before my graduation, Yao Chiang told me that I should submit to a journal instead since I already had a conference paper. So, I started to write my 1st journal paper. I finished my paper for IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM) in June, and then got drafted into the compulsory military training. My professor Hung-Yu Wei helped me submit it in August because he said it would increase the odds of acceptance (with me still being the 1st author).

Writing a journal paper really was much more demanding than writing a conference paper. It was much longer and the structure was more rigorous. I also finally adopted the proper way of writing latex, splitting TEX files by sections and using bibtex for references.

In October, I got 1st review. It was a very mild review to everyone’s surprise. The reviewers left out a lot of my big problems but only focused on the minor ones for some reason. I submitted my response and then got accepted in January. Never knew you could get accepted for a journal after only one review. Normally there would be 3 rounds of reviews.

Review

After getting an IEEE conference and an IEEE journal accepted, I concluded that 99% of the academic is a joke. All my researches are useless, yet they still get accepted. I prefer the actual software development work so much.