https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd

State :

• Qualify Notice : DEPARTMENT NOTICE: All PhD students must pass the qualifying exam in December.
• Call for Papers : The great International Conference on PhD Simulation (ICPS) is calling for papers. Submission is open for the following 6 months. If you have any preliminary result, you can submit. You can submit a conference paper once you have a major result.

Advisor Event :

• Qualify Reminder : Your advisor thought that your are not well prepared for your qualifying exam and urged you to pay more attention to it.
• Too Many Ideas : Your advisor sent you an email saying that you should focus more on turing ideas into solid results.
• Not Enough Papers : Your advisor sent you an email saying that you should focus more on turing ideas into solid results.
• Rejected Paper : Your advisor sent you an email regarding the rejection of your recent paper. "Do not get discouraged by the reviewers' comments. Cool off, revise, and resubmit."

Idea Generation :

• Gain New Idea : After digging into piles of papers, you suddenly gained a new idea.
• Gain New Idea 2 : After scratching your head for countless hours, you came up with a new idea.
• Seminar : You attended a seminar related to your research this month. The speaker's slides were very inspiring and you gained a new idea.
• Seminar 2 : A distinguished lecturer gave a inspiring talk in this week's seminar. You suddenly came up with a new idea.
• Shower Idea : You found the missing piece during a shower. You develop one of your preliminary results into a major result.
• Good Idea : Your advisor thinks your new idea sounds interesting. You feel encouraged.

Buffs :

• First Year Excitement : +1 hope every month.
• Slack Off Success : You relaxed for a while and regained some hope.
• Upgraded Equipment : Increases the chance of getting nice figures.
• Funding Rises : ACADEMIC NEWS: an increase in the government research funding is expected. "Continuous investments in scientific research will pave the way to a brighter future," said one of the government officials.
• More Funding : Your advisor became the PI of a new research grant. Everyone in the lab was excited.
• New Equipment : Your advisor upgraded the old lab equipment. Everyone was excited.
• Cloud Storage : "UNIVERSITY NEWS: free cloud storage now available to all students and faculties. Your data are now safe on the cloud." Automatically synchronizes local data to the cloud. Risk of losing experiment data is drastically reduced.
• Lost Data Recovered : The computer crashed when processing the data. Luckily you recovered them from the cloud storage and obtained a nice figure.

Pre-paper stage :

• Idea : A simple idea to be developed to a preliminary result.
• Preliminary Result : Some preliminary findings. Can be potentially developed into a major result.
• Major Result : Some major findings. With three figures, you can draft a new paper.
• Figure : A nice looking figure summarizing your hard work conducting various experiments. With three figures and a major result, you can draft a paper.

Research Phase :

• Gain Prelim Result : Your idea is working! You obtained some a preliminary result.
• Gain Major Result : You developed a major result.
• Gain Figure : The experiments went very well. You gained a nice figure.
• Draft Paper Complete : You completed your draft paper and submitted it!
• Paper Accepted : INBOX: We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been ACCEPTED for publication.
• Resubmitted Paper Accepted : INBOX: We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been ACCEPTED for publication.

Paper stage :

• Submitted Paper : A nice looking figure summarizing your hard work conducting various experiments. With three figures and a major result, you can draft a paper.
• Resubmitted Paper : A resubmitted paper, waiting for another round of the judgement from the reviewers.
• Rejected Paper : A rejected, waiting to be rewritten and resubmitted.
• Paper : A published paper!
• Submitted Conference Paper : A submitted conference paper, waiting for the judgement from the reviewers.
• Conference Paper : A published conference paper. Reduces the chance of losing your new ideas to other researchers.

Debuffs :

• Caught Slack Off : Your advisor caught you slacking off and reminded you of your tasks via various emails.
• Caught Slack Off 1 : Your advisor made a phone call to the lab and found out that your were not in the lab. You received an email reminding you of your research progress.
• Caught Slack Off 2 : Your advisor sent you several emails but did not get any reply. Your advisor then figured out that you are not in the lab and sent you another email reminding of your pending tasks.
• Broken Equipment : Lab equipment broken by new students. Cannot conduct experiments this month.
• Exhaustion : -5 hope every month. Time to slow down and take a break.
• Unhappy Advisor : -5 hope every month. Your advisor is not very satisfied with your performance.
• Funding Falls : ACADEMIC NEWS: due to high deficits, the government is expected to cut its spending this fiscal year. Research funding is likely to be affected.
• Less Funding : Your advisor did not get any new funding for a while. Everyone in the lab felt a little worried.
• Lost Funding : The funding of one of your advisor's projects was cut. Everyone in the lab felt worried.
• Old Idea : After talking with your advisor about your new idea, your advisor suggested you check an old paper. It turns out that it has been done before.
• Old Idea 2 : Your advisor thought your new idea is not interesting, and suggested you come up with a new one.
• Old Idea 3 : Your advisor thought your new idea is not novel enough, and suggested you read more papers.
• Old Idea 4 : You came up with a bunch of ideas. However, upon further searching, you found that they have already been done before.
• No Idea : You opened too many tabs in the web browser and it suddenly crashed. You lost track of the papers you were reading.
• Idea Not Working : It turned out that this idea is not working. Time to try another one.
• No Major Result : You are quite certain that you will get some interesting results. However, you need more time to find the missing piece.
• No Major Result 2 : Your advisor pointed out a problem in your derivations. You need to rethink about your approach.
• No Figure : You did not get any interesting results from the current setup. It seems that you need to conduct more experiments.
• No Figure 2 : Your program ran out of memory and crashed. You need to redo some of the experiments.
• No Figure 3 : The simulation took a much longer time than you expected. The results are not available yet.
• No Figure 4 : You encountered an technical issue while setting up the experiments. It took you a while to find a work-around and you definitely need more time to complete the experiments.
• Lost Data : The computer crashed when processing the data. It seems that you need to redo the experiments.
• Wrong Figure : You obtained some contradicting results. Something went wrong and you need to more time to check it.
• Draft Paper Incomplete : Your advisor was too busy to go through the draft paper with you last month.
• Draft Paper Incomplete 2 : Despite your effort, you did not complete your draft paper. You need to add more details to the background section.
• Draft Paper Incomplete 3 : Despite your effort, you did not complete your draft paper. You need to add more details to the result section.
• Paper Rejected : INBOX: Based on the reviewers' comments, we regret to inform you that your manuscript has been REJECTED for publication. One of the reviewers though the proposed approach is not novel enough.
• Paper Rejected 2 : One of the reviewers pointed out a problem in the derivation of the main conclusion.
• Paper Rejected 3 : One of the reviewers commented that the figures are not convincing.
• Paper Rejected 4 : One of the reviewers pointed out that there is no comparison with state-of-art method.
• Paper Rejected 5 : One of the reviewers commented that the main conclusion is not intuitive and poorly explained.
• Paper Rejected 6 : One of the reviewers found your manuscript very difficult to read.
• Paper Rejected 7 : One of the reviewers pointed out that your assumptions are unrealistic in practice.
• Paper Rejected 8 : One of the reviewers commented that your contributions are not significant enough.
• Paper Rejected 9 : One of the reviewers questioned your experiment setup and requested you conduct additional experiments.
• Resubmitted Paper Rejected : INBOX: We regret to inform you that your revised manuscript has been REJECTED for publication.
• Idea Done by Others : You found one of your ideas appears in a recently published paper. You can no longer work on it.
• Prelim Done by Others : You found one of your preliminary results appears in a recently published paper. You can no longer work on it.
• Figure Invalid : Upon checking your recent experiment results, you noticed that you used wrong parameters and one of your figures becomes invalid. You must redo this experiment.
• Cannot Use Equipment : You cannot use lab equipment to verify your results next month. That sucks.
• Conf Paper Rejected : Your submission to ICPS{{year}} was REJECTED. The reviewers were not convinced of the significance your results. Nevertheless, you can continue to work on these results.
• Late Year Anxiety : -1 hope every month. You began to worry about your graduation.
• Overdue : You failed to obtain your PhD in time.
• Lost All Hope : You lost all hope and quitted your PhD.

Conference :

• Conf Paper Accepted : "INBOX: Congratulations on the ACCEPTANCE of this nice work as an poster paper in ICPS{{year}}."
• Conf Paper Accepted 2 : "INBOX: Congratulations on the ACCEPTANCE of this nice work as an oral paper in ICPS{{year}}."
• Attend Conf : You arrived at the conference center for ICPS{{year}} and finished your presentation. Let us check the schedule for the next day.
• Skip Conf Session : Take a tour around the city.
• Conf Nice Tour : The city is beautiful and you felt reinvigorated after walking around the streets.
• Skip Conf Session Fail : You ran across your advisor while wandering around. That was embarrassing.
• Skip Conf Session Fail : Your advisor wanted to meet with you in the conference center but did not find you.
• Conf New Idea : You attended several interesting talks and came up with a new idea while discussing with other researchers during the conference.
• Conf No New Idea : The talks were interesting. The food was great, too.

Good Ending :

• Paper Cited : Your recent paper got more citations. You feel recognized.
• Graduated : Congratulations! You finished your thesis and passed your PhD defense. You finally earned your PhD degree. You should be proud of yourself!