Grad School Isn't Forever, But Google Docs Are
September 20, 2024 · Life · Reflection
A reflection on the digital footprints, scattered thoughts, and growth you can track just by opening last year's folders.
I opened a random folder in my Google Drive last week. It was named something like AI_Paper_Notes_Fall23_v2.
Inside? A mess. Half-written abstracts. TODO lists. Tables of results with no context. Prompt engineering drafts for a chatbot that didn’t quite work. Lecture notes from a class I barely remember attending.
But buried in that mess was something unexpected — progress.
A Timeline You Didn’t Mean to Write
I never set out to chronicle my grad school experience. But the timestamps don’t lie:
- April 2023: trying to figure out how to fine-tune a model.
- August 2023: planning infrastructure for the AI teaching tool.
- November 2023: first draft of the resume that got me the ByteDance interview.
You can trace the whole arc. Not through social media. Through Google Docs.
More Than Just Notes
Some docs were pure chaos — but they captured real thoughts in motion:
- Frustration when a system wouldn’t deploy.
- Half-baked theories for a research paper.
- Ideas I was too tired to pitch in class, but wrote down anyway.
They weren’t polished. But they were real. Honest snapshots of how I thought, struggled, and learned.
The Quiet Wins
There are also wins I forgot to celebrate:
- That clean CI/CD diagram I ended up reusing in interviews.
- A debugging checklist that saved me twice.
- Feedback from my advisor that I skimmed then, but now appreciate.
The kind of stuff you ignore when it happens, but thank yourself for later.
What I’m Taking With Me
Grad school ends. The files stay.
I’ll probably export a few, archive the rest. But more than anything, I’m grateful for that paper trail. It’s imperfect, chaotic, and sometimes embarrassing — but it tells the real story.
If you’re in school (or even just building something), keep the notes. Keep the drafts. One day, you’ll open a folder and realize how far you’ve come.
And maybe, just maybe — future-you will say thanks.