Five years after finishing grad school, my master's thesis has been published in an academic journal.
I'm grateful to the senior and junior colleagues who wrote it up as first authors. And to my advisor, too. He didn't leave my name off — he put me down as second author. I've left academia, so being listed as an author doesn't really benefit me in any concrete way, but he included me anyway, out of respect for research ethics. Most grad students have nothing good to say about their lab after they graduate, but ours really was one of the good ones.
The research is about super-resolving two-dimensional synthetic femur images. It starts from Wolff's Law, a property of bone, then throws in deep learning models that were big at the time, like ResNet and SRGAN, plus a conventional imaging algorithm, the quilting algorithm — all sorts of things mashed together. Truly the height of flailing to graduate. Anyway, to think that master's thesis became an SCI paper. I was the one who came up with the methodology and even I had no expectations for it. My advisor and the people in the lab are impressive.
I worked with femurs a lot during my master's. Not just two-dimensional images, but actual CT femur scans. The CT imaging problem is interesting too — you take two-dimensional images from multiple angles and reconstruct them into three dimensions. I even won an award from the mechanical engineering society for the CT imaging work.
And yet
And yet, after all that research, I never managed to look after my own hip mobility. My hips are still incredibly stiff. For me, things like the femur and the hip joint weren't really body parts at all — they were more like virtual objects in my head.
The funnier part was somewhere else. First, the femur has three landmarks: (1) femoral head (2) greater trochanter (3) lesser trochanter
And yet it was only recently that I learned where the actual greater trochanter and lesser trochanter are on my own body. The greater trochanter can be palpated. Press your hand against the outside of your pelvis and rotate your leg inward and outward — you'll feel a bone, and that's the greater trochanter.
I studied and worked with all of it, and yet never connected it to my own reality. For two years I didn't know exactly where it was on my body. In my head, sure, I knew. But being able to close my eyes and feel my way there with my hands, roughly here — that's something I only figured out now. And it's not even that hard.
If you can't connect it to reality, you haven't really learned it. Sure, there can be meaning in the process of learning, but once you're in your thirties, that stops being an excuse. Now, whenever I learn something, I keep asking myself how I'll actually use it in real life. I shouldn't repeat the mistakes of the past.