Something Important..

Today I had an experience that further reinforced the fact that the only thing that you can do alone is in the toilet! ( This is actually a famous quote by the late Reliance Chairman, Dhirubai Ambani)
It was my turn today to present a paper at the reading group. I chose to present a paper on Phylogenetic Tree Construction. After, the paper I presented a couple of ideas that I thought could be converted into something practical. The ideas did seem very good to me. But, as I presented it to the group, different comments started flowing in and I realized that what I was taking up wasnt as easy as it looked. I got a new perspective on the problem and realized that I had to confront a lot of issues
1) I had to make my method hold up against all the existing work, current research in the field had some models to measure algorithms. My method had to measure up to all those modes. The inexperienced grad student that I am, it would be an extremely difficult task.
2) The project would be a reasonably long range project. Though in the end the idea might work out, the risk was pretty high. It would make a lot more sense to work on smaller, easier and well defined problems before moving into a task of this dimension.
These are things that I would have never realized on my own! You tend to get a bit carried away with the fact that you have thought of something interesting and become oblivious to the subtleities that decide if it's going to succeed or fail. I was thankful for the objective criticism that I recieved. I think I am going to provide the same kind of objective evaluation to other's ideas in the meetings!
Moral of the story: Listen to others. For your own good! Tell them what you think. For their own good!