Finalizing

I wrote this before I got the final results, more about that in the last post.

It is of great pleasure to finalize a project you have been working on for a long while. Getting to the end is although just the beginning. With this accumulated knowledge over several months, you are about to make a decision to either to take it in practice, or let it go. The latter is the easiest, as you do not have to think about it anymore. But is this the right choice? Would it not be better to actually embrace your work, the fruit of your hard efforts? It depends.

Was there any gain of positive result from your experiments?

While the outcome normally does not matter if your project is deemed successful or not, it is more if the result can be used. The positive conclusion may just give you exactly what you expected, but a failure could still give valuable insight into certain areas that could be further experimented upon.

Were the predictions aligned to your experiments?

It does not matter if you predicted correctly, but more if your predictions were in the same class as the result.

Will the paper benefit any field where you are currently working in?

Most writing a paper did so for the university personnel or for a company. Those have specific goals with the experiment, meaning that as long as you finish it in the way they have set it up, it will most probably be used. However, as not everyone end up in working for them after graduation, the reason to use the paper diminishes. However, it could still be used as a leverage into a new position, or a project you have been working on. It will rarely lead to the creation of a company, but it is not impossible (Most big companies nowadays have their CEO leaving the university before graduation).

Conclusion

In the end, you have accumulated months worth of knowledge and gained loads of experience, not just about the subject per say, but also how to write a paper properly, further increasing your professional writing and (in my case) improve the language of choices vocabulary and grammar. Now make use of it, to make you a better professional.

I did not fail with my paper, but while I looked forward to a positive result, I also had in mind what would happen if it failed, and what caused this. I had several surprising side effects which I could easily explain and give pointers to continued experimentation. Sadly, I cannot use everything from my paper for PixelMap, but the result gave some pointers toward what I really should focus on if I want to improve it further, something I will explain more in detail in the future whenever I implement it. This was expected, but only because instead of writing the paper about the improvement for PixelMap, I disguised the actual problem in another problem to gather the result that mattered for PixelMap.