Nathaniel Hamilton

Happy New Year!

My 2021 and Goals for 2022

by Nathaniel Hamilton

Happy New Year!! 2021 was an eventful year and 2022 is looking to have even more big changes in store for my life. I am both excited and extremely nervous for the things to come. But first, I want to take a moment to reflect and review the last year before trying to wrap my head around the things to come.

2021 in Review

A lot happened this last year. I submitted 8+ papers to conferences and 3 got accepted. I got married. I passed my Qualifying Exam, which upgraded me from a PhD student to a PhD candidate. I got vaccinated for COVID and managed to not get sick. All-in-all, an eventful year with some very big ups that were followed by some sharp downs as I crashed from exhaustion. I do not recommend getting married the week before submitting 3 papers to a conference. It adds a ton of stress and hurts the quality of the papers being submitted. That being said, I thought it prudent to try and highlight some of the things I did well as well as mark some things I still need to improve on. These can be used to help better inform the goals I create for myself in the new year, but I’ll be nice to myself and hold off on making it an exhaustive list of everything I need to work on.

Things I did well and am proud of

  1. I did a lot of writing that was praised for it’s coherency. All the reviews I received for my submitted papers commented on how well written the works were. I am proud of that since what good is a published paper if nobody understands it or wants to read it?
  2. I married my beautiful, intelligent, caring, supportive wife Kendall. Every day I am reminded of how blessed I am that she said yes when I asked her to marry me and followed through with it.
  3. I passed my qualifying exam. It required selecting my committee, writing up a rough draft of my dissertation and proposal for new work (it was 79 pages), and giving an hour long presentation followed by intense questions from my committee. It was a ton of work to complete and I was so releived when they told me I passed.

Things I need to work on

  1. Getting outside more often. Walking from the car to the lab is not enough time to properly appreciate how beautiful the world is outside my apartment/lab. I have dearly missed it.
  2. Writing more efficiently with fewer delays so I’m finishing papers before the day they are due.
  3. Allowing myself to take a break. Working non-stop until the project/paper is done can be necessary, but I rarely allow myself to rest without feeling immense guilt over it. I need to stop feeling so guilty about stepping away from the work so I have the energy to attack problems with 100% instead of forgoing the rest and only managing 40%.

My Goals for 2022

Having reviewed my 2021, looking at my accomplishments, I have just a few goals going into the new year. A new year that will (hopefully) see me graduate with my PhD, secure a job, and potentially move to a new city1. The first 6 months of 2022 will be particularly busy as I try to finish up everything I need to graduate and get a job.

Most of my goals are directly related to things I need to do to graduate, and the rest I made in the hopes of improving my quality of life and/or addressing some of the things I need to work on. I’ve tried to make my goals qauntitative so at the end of the year I can look back a check off whether or not I met that goal or can assign a grade to how well I met it. Thus, my goals are:

  1. Get at least 1 first author paper published.
  2. Defend my dissertation and graduate.
  3. Get a job in my field.
  4. Walk outside more often; aiming to get at least 10,000 steps in every day like I used to.
  5. Continue to blog once a week. Maybe start adding coffee shop reviews.
  6. Read at least one book every month and try to branch out into some more non-fiction titles.
  7. Take a vacation that lasts longer than a weekend.
  8. Travel outside of Nashville for a reason that doesn’t involve visiting family2.

Wish me luck as I try to achieve all these goals and I hope you all have an amazing year where you achieve all the goals you set for yourself!

  1. I have loved my time in Nashville, but, as I’ve been looking into job postings, I haven’t found much around the city that fits. If I am to stay in Nashville, it will probably be for a fully remote job and I’m not sure that’s something I want. However, that’s a problem for a different day. ↩

  2. This goal is contingent on COVID numbers dropping again to a point where it is safe to travel. ↩