Lessons from academia 2

The first semester of my Ph.D. went by unbelievably fast. While I greatly enjoyed learning geometry and topology, things did not go that well in research for me. Both of the projects I was working on since summer ended in obscurity. On the quantum information side, our conjecture that a unitary two-design quantum circuit shows rapid mixing failed the numerical tests leaving us with a lack of explanation to reconcile our intuition with the numerics. Whereas, in the other project on AdS/CFT and Condensed matter stuff we were shocked by seeing a paper appearing in Arxiv with identical results as ours!

There is an important lesson for me here. There is always downs and ups in research. Not every projects that you start has a glorious successful ending!