Today I came across a great article on passion in research on Paul Ward’s website at the University of Waterloo and it motivated me to write something short about it on this site since it seems to fit with what I’ve been spending my time on lately.
[http://ccng.uwaterloo.ca/~pasward/Opinions/polanyi.shtml](http://ccng.uwaterloo.ca/~pasward/Opinions/polanyi.shtml)
The main message that I like about the article is that being intelligent or talented does not necessarily make you a good researcher but passion is whats necessary to succeed. I think this a very important idea because almost everyone I have met so far in this program has at some time felt very stupid about something they said or did but they still had the determination to keep going. It’s impossible to ever know everything there is to know about a subject so the most important thing to have is passion. You have to want to ask questions and be truly interested in what your doing. It reminds me of a quote my friend in film told me the other day at work, “Its not how talented you are, just how much determination you have”. I am just happy that I have found my passion in computers and hopefully that I will be able to do research and ask questions about how they work and how to make them work better for the rest of my life. I could spend hours reading articles and papers and still feel like there is not enough time in a day to get it all done. It’s almost funny reading about some of the pioneers in computing and how they were involved in almost every field within computers today from networking to AI to graphics and HCI. Now here I am and I can’t even find enough time to catch up in even one field. I guess thats what the graduate students must be for, to save some time for the prof by telling them in summary about all the best new articles!
Additionally, there are other interesting articles, quotes and opinions collected from the same professor as the above article here by Paul Ward at the University of Waterloo
[http://ccng.uwaterloo.ca/~pasward/opinions.shtml](http://ccng.uwaterloo.ca/~pasward/opinions.shtml)