Philip J. Guo > Quotes

“Be proactive in talking with professors to find research topics that are mutually interesting, and no matter what, don’t just hole up in isolation.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“If an automated bug-finding tool finds, say, 1,000 possible bugs, which ones are likely to be important?”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Having full intellectual freedom was actually a curse, since I was not yet prepared to handle it.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“In sum, the purpose of academic research is to produce validated ideas, not polished products.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“It’s impossible for Klee to “surgically extract” the code of each device driver and analyze its 1,000 lines in isolation.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“correlate project activity with bugs”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“He was an ardent pragmatist who cared more about achieving compelling results than demonstrating theoretical “interestingness” for the sake of appearing scholarly.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“As a researcher, it’s foolish to expect people to use your prototypes as though they were real products; if your ideas are good, then professional engineers might adapt them into their company’s future products.”
― Philip J. Guo

“Any piece of prototype software developed for research purposes will have lots of unforeseen bugs”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Learning to send succinct and effective professional emails has benefited my career tremendously”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“In the end, it took three attempts by four Ph.D. students over the course of five years before Dawson’s initial Klee-UC idea turned into a published paper. Of those four students, only one “survived”—I quit the Klee project, and two others quit the Ph.D. program altogether. From an individual student’s perspective, the odds of success were low.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Too bad Klee couldn’t automatically find bugs in its own code!”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“I realized that constantly dwelling on my past led to depressing nostalgia and thinking about the future brought uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. I strived to live in the present, and I had an amazing time during my year in New York City.”
― Philip J. Guo, On the Move

“The professor might need to go through several rounds of student failures and dropouts before one set of students eventually succeeds. Sometimes that might take two years, sometimes five years, or sometimes even ten years to achieve. Many projects last longer than individual Ph.D. student “lifetimes.” But as long as the original vision is realized and published, then the project is considered a success.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Here is how HCI projects are typically done:
1. Observe people to find out what their real problems are.
2. Design innovative tools to help alleviate those problems.
3. Experimentally evaluate the tools to see if they actually help people”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Although I was interested in developing new ways to measure software quality, I acknowledged that it was only a fuzzy dream with no grounding in formal research methodologies that the academic community would deem acceptable.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Like all tenured professors, his role was not to be “fighting in the trenches” alongside his students.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“If it’s already been done before, then it wouldn’t be research!”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“I think that the best way to combat racism and other forms of prejudice is to get to know people as individuals and not merely as representatives of a particular group”
― Philip J. Guo

“Online submission forms are black holes. Anything
is better than blindly submitting online.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“The importance of the third point—thinking in terms of experiments—when proposing research project ideas.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“I had to make a convincing case for how IncPy was different enough from similar projects. Within a few days, I had sketched out an initial project plan, which included arguments for why IncPy was unique, innovative, and research-worthy.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Properly calibrating your pitch to the academic sub-community you’re targeting is crucial for getting a paper accepted”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“When my father picked me up from school that night and walked me home, I replayed the pure joy of the dance in my head over and over again. I was sad that I would probably never get to see these kids again, but I was prepared all along not to become emotionally attached. I knew that I was moving to Los Angeles, California in a few months so nothing that I experienced here could stay with me. The year had exceeded all of my expectations, and I felt so thankful that we had the opportunity to live here. I remembered all of the good times during my year in New York City, and I just smiled.”
― Philip J. Guo, On the Move

“The best part about the class was that the teacher would first lecture on a particular piece of art, then she would show us slides and photographs of it, and after some analysis, she would take us on a short walk to the worldfamous Metropolitan Museum of Art where we would actually see the real thing.”
― Philip J. Guo, On the Move

“Fellowships are important not for the money, but rather for the freedom from grant-related constraints.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Without proper guidance or context, I ended up wasting a lot of time and not extracting any meaningful insights from my readings”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“When my father picked me up from school that night
and walked me home, I replayed the pure joy of the dance in my head over and over again. I was sad that I would probably never get to see these kids again, but I was prepared all along not to become emotionally attached. I knew that I was moving to Los Angeles, California in a few months so nothing that I experienced here could stay with me. The year
had exceeded all of my expectations, and I felt so thankful that we had the opportunity to live here. I remembered all of the good times during my year in New York City, and I just smiled.”
― Philip J. Guo, On the Move

“Real research is never done in a vacuum.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“The lesson here is that it’s very hard to publish on a
topic if your advisor isn’t also obsessively thinking about it, since you’re directly competing against
other students whose advisors are obsessively
thinking about it.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir