I have just started my Personal PhD journey. I’m super excited!

The idea is to gain deep understanding and expertise in the field of Computational Linguistics. All the details are described in this document.

I have fulfilled my “admission criteria” that I set for myself:

1. I have shared the document above about this idea with more than 10 people. At first it was scary, but then it turned out I received a very positive response plus fantastic suggestions. It also made me to clarify more things and add more stories. One thing I am learning from this experience is that once you share a project with the world it somehow takes a life on its own. 🙂 Experience will show whether that’s for better or worse.
2. I wrote up a document on how I studied Spanish for three months and then went to Costa Rica and was able to get around with my Spanish. It includes tips of how you could have a similar mission. Here.
3. I wrote up a document and shared it at work about my experience over last five years of migrating data storage systems. (Unfortunately can’t share it outside of Google). That was definitely pushing my comfort zone as it was sharing an opinion so it shouldn’t have the right or wrong answer. But it is software engineering and many things can be argued till they are black or white. I was afraid people would argue that I was wrong, but it did not happen.