What I Learned at SIGMOD 2020

I loved every bit of the experience and got a bit sad that SIGMOD is over. This post is developed to help me crystalize a fraction of my learnings from the past week. Overall, the conference is life-changing, and I felt grateful for the opportunity to participate.

I get to know the field of databases better and have a more clear idea of my research interests.

• Before SIGMOD: I felt that I was only doing research in my little room, focusing on a specific problem. I read papers on schema exploration, query recommendation, and provenance summarization. But to me, they were three independent islands scattered around a huge canvas that’s covered in mist.
• After SIGMOD: The research tracks gave me a good understanding of the rough subtopics in databases and how my problem fits in a bigger picture.
• An analogy: My objective is to find my “true” research interests. SIGMOD helped me balance the trade-off between exploration and exploitation by showing me examples of cool work in each research session. This gave me valuable data points to adjust my utility function accordingly, which allowed me to scope out a space to dig deeper. That leads to my second learning.

I want to work with my research crushes no matter where they are.

(Cue the song Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.)

• Background info: I’m applying to grad school this year.
• Before SIGMOD: When I considered where to apply to, “school ranking” was a big factor, second to research fit. I was sure that I’m interested in the user side of database systems but would also seriously stretch my research interests just to apply to prestigious schools.
• After SIGMOD: Research fit becomes the only thing that matters. I associate people with the cool stuff they do, everything else goes away. Specifically, seeing a variety of work presented in the HILDA workshop triggered me to think, “This is exactly what I want!” Now I can only see myself applying to places where our interests match.

I think of you as my cousin/uncle/auntie next door.

• Before SIGMOD: My nervousness hinders how I interact with people, especially when I try to impress them, or when they’re more senior than me. My brain blacks out.
• During SIGMOD: Still an issue. But thanks to Gather, I found that it became easier for my personality to come through when I was oblivious to who I was talking to, or when I was so carried away by my curiosity and burning questions.
• After SIGMOD: Still unsolved. But as an intermediate step, I want to (with respect) think of you as my cousin/uncle/auntie next door to help myself focus on the conversation and come up with questions.

I went into the conference thinking, “I’ll milk this till the bitter end.” I think I did the best I could. No regrets!

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