Getting into research
AA: What advice can you give to someone wanting to follow in your footsteps and become a researcher in this field?
PV: I think that there’s a lot of interesting advice one can give, but I’ll try to single out maybe a few pieces of advice that were most helpful for me.
I’ll preface this with a disclaimer to say the things that worked well for me might not work well for others, but at least given my temperament and my approach to research, they were quite useful.
One thing that I would highly recommend people do if they want to get started and build a good, solid career in the area, either as a research scientist or a research engineer, is to not just stop at reading papers or blog posts that they find very interesting. There’s a lot of interesting content going around nowadays from many different sources, and it’s very easy to trap yourself in a cycle of just reading about all of these different things rather than actually...