So I'm really fucking depressed and I have been for a few months now. Like I've been depressed since I was 15 but I'm pretty down right now. Most of it has to do with gradschool not really working out well.
Today I got a paper accepted to a shitty conference and I really wish it was rejected. Its a terrible paper. Its my first paper accept in the 1.5 years I've been in grad school. I have another shitty paper that has been rejected twice. My other projects were all failures.
So this paper that got accepted - has bad novelity, basically techniques were done more because they would be novel than because I thought they would work. A paper needs novelty in order to get published. It also has bad analysis of the methods used. Basically I set a bunch of parameters and then don't try anything else, due to time constraints. Also at about the end of the project I found two papers that did what I was trying to do but did it much better. The issue is that both papers were poorly written and hardly explained their results or how they got them, which made it very hard to compare my results to theirs.
Now there are reasons why this was done. I need published papers to move though academia. My supervisor needs papers to get promoted. This is my job. I get paid 30 grand a year to publish papers. And so I'm going to publish this paper I'm extremely embarrassed about. It's bad science. What's more is the reviewers all called me out, rightfully, on the serious issues of the paper, but it still got accepted. They also want it cut down to 8 pages from 12, while adding in a bunch of shit, which is impossible and won't be done. This will just make the paper worse.
I kind of had a high view of 'science' before gradschool and the pressures in academia to just publish regardless of quality has kind of killed my interest in research. I feel like I'm just contributing to the noise of shitty science. Those two papers papers that beat me, I can't really figure out because they are shitty papers and shitty science, and now I'm contributing shit on top of that and some poor chump is going to come along and have to try and figure out my work. Its just painful and I'm not proud at all.
I'm working on a project now that I'm highly interested in (I was not interested in the above project at all) but I can find no motivation to do anything just because I feel terrible about this paper. I really hate life right now.
