It happens in the life of every grad student.. some more often than others. Some take it harder than others.. some pretend it never happened and continue to live in denial.. some point fingers at the reviewers for simply not understanding...

yes...

today for the first time ever...

i.. "got my paper back". Rejected. Game over. No soup for me.

They say the first rejection is the hardest.. but i've been told it gets easier as time goes on and that i should expect on average 50% rejection... (hard to believe since most of the people in my lab come out with 7-8 publications)... seems a bit surreal.. one moment you're on top of the world.. pumping publications.. thinking you got this "grad school" thing down.. planning your future.. sprucing up your resume.. next thing you know, your work is stalled, you need to backtrack.. fix.. re-run simulations.. resubmit elsewhere.. a lower tier conference perhaps.

I have to admit that at first i was a bit sad... we'd worked a year on this paper.. missed several deadlines for submitting to other conferences.. but then looking back, i'm thankful.. thankful for the opportunities God's given me to even send to and attend these conferences.. thankful for a great professor that really bends over backwards to train and take care of me.. thankful for brilliant colleagues to work (and in this case, commiserate) with.. and thankful that my God always knows exactly what i need. Rejection is never easy, but the lessons learned in this and every rejection are worth it... whatever can get me closer to God. New opportunities will come, but i wouldn't trade times of dependence like these for anything.

We (from my lab) submitted 4 papers to this conference and all of them came back.. so.. with that, the rest of this entry is dedicated to my labmates/colleagues (fellow peons under our fearless professor) who always makes things fun and interesting in the Networks Lab:

i present to you.. Shiv's Drone Army

Vijay Subramanian - Craig Patridge from BBN (they invented the internet) said once .. and i quote.. "we are ready to pay anyone a BILLION dollars to come up with an all-purpose TCP that works in wireless, dialup, satellite links, and normal wired links". TCP is the work-horse of the internet.. nothing would be possible without TCP.. it is the root of all "best-effort" evils that exist in today's internet. Vijay is that man.. his work on LT-TCP and LL-HARQ .. both patent pending, will provide higher bandwidth to wireless and high loss environments. In short, he's reinventing your internet!

Vicky Sharma - Also known as "Mr. Analysis" for his quick thinking and ridiculous skills in all things Stoch as seen by his TOPPING of the ECSE doctorate qualifier exams, Vicky's claim to fame is writing on our advisor's Christmas card a one liner: "thanks for the food. - Vicky". Vicky works on multi-path TCP. Imagine sending a letter from NJ to Cali and instead of it getting sent via one carrier, someone takes the letter, chops it up into a million pieces and sends each piece on different routes.. and at the end, someone in Cali rejoins all the pieces... and they can do this without recieving all the pieces. This is what "Mr. Analysis" does.

Hsin-Yi Shen - Hsin-Yi is our resident expert in all things physical layer (antenna, line coding stuff). Not only can she create powerpoint presentations faster than any of us but she has a knack for actually being "on-task" and hardworking. Hsin-Yi's research area is in asynchronous cooperative MIMO... you know all those routers that you buy (802.11n) with the multiple antennas that are supposed to make your bandwidth jump from 11Mbps to 5000000 Mbps? Yah.. her research makes you be able to do that with just one antenna. Cool stuff.

Quite a few brilliant minds churning away in our windowless lab... you might be wondering.. "with all these smart people doing all this really cool research, what does Bow-Nan actually do? It must be really cool!!! He must've upgraded from making pringles can antennas all day!!"

Well. . . . . . . .

i draw lines. lots of them. sometimes with straight edges, sometimes just in my mind, and sometimes after i haven't gotten much sleep =P. lines are what i do best =]