Ask for help, not for time.

Nothing gets me more excited than deep thinking or a long struggle to find an answer. I picked up this habit at high school during my entrance prep days, where thinking from the fundamentals was pivotal. It served me well during those days and also through undergrad, where the problems were simple. This reinforced my belief that any problem was solvable if I put enough time into it. I tried to continue this into grad school and it has not served me well. Deadlines, the need to report weekly research updates, and time constraints took away the luxury of not being time efficient. 

An incident that happened some time back helped me realize the usefulness of asking for help rather than ruminating. I working on a project where I had to cluster a set of points. I was working on that problem for a day, googling possible clustering algorithms which would work for me. The problem was that I couldn't use classical clustering algorithms such as k-Nearest neighbor regardless of the distance metric used. While stuck on this problem, my roommate happened to come up to me to chat in my room. I was casually telling him how frustrated I was since I couldn't figure this problem out, he casually pointed me to an existing clustering algo known as DBSCAN which worked beautifully! This algo is a pretty new find and is not included in most textbooks. Left to myself I would not have figured this out!

This episode has humbled me and made me realize the sheer gains that can be made in asking people for help. So go out and ask for help, but keep in mind not to overdo it :)