Thesis retrospective and MapleStory
Status of the Fangzhao
I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis in late May, and I started a job at Honeywell Quantum Solutions not long after. Here I’ll provide links to a video of my thesis defense and to my thesis paper, and then present a nano-memoir on maplestory. I first started writing this post on a sleepless night following my defense, but never quite finished it until now.
The Thesis Defense
I gave my defense over Zoom, and even though I sent out invitations really last-minute, it ended up attracting a few dozen of my colleagues, friends, and family members. Unfortunately, the timing was such that not everybody was able to see it, so I recorded the entire thing and put it on YouTube here:
For my defense, I had to give a roughly 30-minute talk (longer with questions) about some aspect of my graduate school research. Because Eric, Bryce, and I have conducted so many studies over the last 6 years, I decided to only talk about my most “recent” first-author work on interacting physics within momentum-space lattices (this is still unpublished/in prep). I have “recent” in quotes because this data was taken almost two years ago, back when our apparatus was still up and running. Luckily, I already did all of the hard work in making the talk during my job search earlier in the year, and only had to slightly modify the presentation to give the more general audience something to latch onto.
The Thesis Paper
I once dreamed of writing the perfect dissertation, with clearly laid-out math behind all the different laser cooling and trapping techniques, and concise, understandable language that would dodge the excessive jargon of my published papers. Unfortunately, the reality was that I had limited time and motivation to write this thing, and ended up producing a mishmash of old papers, new unpublished work, and basic AMO physics all stitched together as some sort of Frankenstein’s monster:
The cold atom toolbox in momentum space
It’s over 240 pages long with all the front and back matter included (which notably beats Eric’s 216 pages!!), yet only around half of it is “new” content that I wrote this year, with the rest being text modified from my papers. Ideally I would’ve spent a lot more time adapting these older sections to make them at least slightly understandable, but my mistake was adopting the same (lack of) work schedule that I employed for my undergraduate thesis: procrastinating until right before the deadline and then pounding it out with many days of poor sleep.
But whereas I suffered only one intense week for my undergrad thesis, my graduate thesis took about a month and a half of constant work, usually done between midnight and 8 AM and powered by the MapleStory soundtrack. My nostalgic feelings about that stupidly grindy game was the perfect fuel for my stupidly grindy work, almost like some Pavlovian response. Naturally, I ended up thinking about MapleStory a lot, despite being 13 years removed from the game…
MapleStory
In one of my many bouts of thesis procrastination, I went back 13 years to my first year of high school. After some self-reflection, I realized that my years of playing MapleStory helped spark my scientific career. Here’s how…
The year was 2007, and I’d been heavily invested for a year in the wonderful MMORPG MapleStory, and in its vibrant and active community. MapleStory was a total grindfest of a game where to gain just a single level, I had to kill the same enemies for hours on end, and there were barely any guides or advice to help make it faster or easier. But that was a lot of the appeal: everybody playing the game was a clueless teenager exploring this huge world, and anybody could figure out a new strategy and contribute to the community. So there was a small niche to fill: well-written, factually-accurate guides on MapleStory.
In late 2007, I made an account on a fansite forum and pumped out three popular guides on the forum, each longer than the last. I recently went back to look at these guides (which will hopefully never see the light of day due to excessive 2000s internet humor and 1337speak), and found that they were 5000, 11000, and 20000 words long (overestimated numbers). These guides were so long that I had to post them in multiple chunks to get past the character limit per forum post, which meant that I needed to write these beforehand and then spam posts so that nobody could sneak a post in the middle of my guide. These word counts don’t even factor in the time I spent formatting the text, editing and embedding pictures and videos, and referencing many other guides and pieces of content.
The entire process of writing a guide like this is, in retrospect, almost identical to writing a research paper. Instead of referencing arXiv papers, I was referencing older guides. And instead of meticulously editing crisp vector graphics images in Adobe Illustrator, I was editing bitmap images in MS Paint and uploading them to Photobucket. At one point, I even wanted peer review of guides, and was willing to spend my time as the curator (editor) of a collection (journal) of high quality guides, as there were a lot of low quality guides floating around the internet with a lot of wrong information. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find enough support for such a huge endeavor so I dropped the idea.
In writing these guides and participating in the community, I had unwittingly entered the world of research. While I wasn’t an expert at the game itself, I found my niche and put in a significant amount of time and effort into preparing my guides, and it showed in the praise and readership that I received. This feedback sparked a lifelong interest in writing, which I later carried over to blogging, paper writing, and now, thesis mangling.