Starting a PhD

#phd #decompilers #start #first #career

Table of Contents

His-story

(5-2) Years Of Undergrad

It was fun because the college was nice in terms of infrastructure, had some good quality friends. Some were for having fun, some where for having quality discussions with. Spent my time coding useless things mostly. I thought I was doing something but it was just useless, but useless only in terms that it’s not used by anyone. Each and every line of code I wrote pushed me towards a better improved version, with much clearer thoughts.

Contributed to very few open-source projects (I don’t know what to compare my contributions with so I find comfort in thinking that I did few contributions, if at all). In a summer when working with an open-source project I landed my first contract that was by only word of mouth back then. I didn’t get to start the work until an year later.

My whole course was supposed to be of 5 years (3 years UG + 2 years PG), but I felt comfortable only till third year there. As soon as I got a good paying job, I wanted to leave ASAP, and that’s what I did. Got some friction from friends, family, myself as well. Mostly because we all were worried where I’ll stand in a few years if I take this decision now.

Almost 1$\frac{2}{12}$ Years of Contract Work

Worked with RevEngAI to help them write plugins for their new product. They are using AI to augment the reverse engineering part and make it less painful and time taking. My task was to write plugins that interacted between the software that their users would use, and, their backend through an improving API. It was fun in the beginning but soon the whole process as I kept refining it became monotonous (just like my college, which is one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to leave).

After exploring about my options, came to know about PhD as a career where I’ll be with those performing cutting edge research. I applied for a position at Arizona State University, contacted the professor I wanted to work with because of our interests alignment, and got a good response. One year later, I’m here and thhis is my third day in the lab at the time of writing this.

I did apply and tried applying to some other universities as well, from some I got responses (good/bad), from some I didn’t get any response at all (maybe due to some technical error).

Application Process

… was too long! Took one year almost. Lots of documents and preparations. I consider myself lucky during this phase of my life. It was pure luck that got me here I think. Had a job that can seed fund my movement to a foreign state, help me book my own flights, visa appointments and all other visits I had to do, I can’t explain it with “not luck”. I did hard work as well once I got the chance, partially damaging my health as well, gained weight in two digits as well, but it worked out, and I’m happy in the end.

Today

Journaling is paramount in this phase of my life I think. What I’m working on and what I’m learning along the way will help me, and my advisor keep track and be able to look back at my history and efforts. One thing I think I’ll have to do a lot is read a lot of papers. Good research papers are like really important nodes in the whole knowledge graph of human knowledge. What are good nodes? Good nodes are those that have good neighbors. What is goodness here? I don’t know, it’s qualitative, maybe you find the paper useful (good) or maybe you don’t.

Started with a single paper (published for the same lab, SEFCOM), got good (interesting) references, found those papers and created an initial set of papers I can start with. You can have the list as well, here :

NODE : https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec23winter-prepub-301-basque.pdf

NEIGHBORS :
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=baf4ce2b061f057d84b25e93fef5a25b0b4180b8
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19_0VDBoIgtQiV5G-e_iDTb00kS4ERlzu/view?usp=share_link
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/11_4_2.pdf
https://rev.ng/downloads/asiaccs-2020-paper.pdf
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity13/sec13-paper_schwartz.pdf
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/lee.pdfz
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/slow.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.05495
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9519451
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec22-chen-qibin.pdf

I’m thinking of this like an inital set of good papers that’ll point me to other good research. Then thinking about how to track all the information? What are my options? I remembered about this long forgotten boulevard “my blog”.

Future

Consider this a start of a series.