Five years after finishing grad school, my master's thesis has been published in a journal.
I'm grateful to the senior and junior colleagues who wrote it up as first author. I'm grateful to my advisor too. They didn't leave my name out; they listed me as second author. I've left academia, so being named as an author doesn't really benefit me, but they still did it, out of respect for research ethics. Most grad students who've graduated have nothing good to say about their labs, but ours really is a good one.
The research is about super-resolving synthetic 2D femur images. Starting from Wolff's Law, a property of bone, I used ResNet and SRGAN, which were famous deep learning models at the time, along with the Quilting algorithm, an older imaging algorithm. I combined all sorts of things. It was the height of flailing around just to graduate. Anyway, to think that master's thesis ended up as an SCI paper. I was the one who devised the method, and even I hadn't expected it. My advisor and the people in the lab are impressive.
During my master's program I worked with the femur a lot. Not only 2D images but real CT femur scans too. The CT problem was interesting as well: you take 2D images from many angles and build them up into 3D. I even won an award at a mechanical engineering society for the CT work.
But
But for all that research, I never took care of my own hip mobility. Even now my hips are really stiff. To me, things like the femur and the hip joint weren't actually parts of a real body. They were more like imaginary objects in my head.
What was more interesting was elsewhere. First, the femur has three landmarks: (1) femoral head (2) greater trochanter (3) leassser trochanter
Yet it was only recently that I learned where the greater trochanter and the lesser trochanter actually sit on my own body. The greater trochanter can be palpated. Press your hand on the outer side of your pelvis and rotate your leg inward and outward, and you'll feel a bone. That's the greater trochanter.
I had studied and worked with it, yet never connected it to my own reality. For two years I didn't know exactly where it was on my body. I knew it in my head. But being able to close my eyes and point to it with my hand, roughly saying "it's about here," is something I only realized just now. And it isn't even that hard.
If you can't connect what you learn to reality, you've learned it in vain. Of course there can be meaning in the process of learning, but once you're past thirty, that's no longer an excuse. Now, whenever I learn something, I keep thinking about how I'll use it in real life. I mustn't repeat my old mistake.