To be successful, you'll face many rejections, failures, and times when you have no idea what you're doing. What's important isn't to avoid those failures, but to learn from them and every other opportunity you have to learn and improve, through both internal reflection and external feedback from mentors. For me, persistence and hard work have led me to where I am today. And, all that hard work was only possible because I truly enjoy the work that I'm doing.
One core part of my job is doing research to figure out the fundamentals of intelligence, such as recreating the perception and motor skills of a two-year old in a robot. That part of my job, my "work", doesn't feel like work at all. It feels like solving a puzzle, akin to the jigsaw puzzles I used to solve simply for recreation. Another core part of my job is teaching and mentoring students, which also feels not like work, but a rewarding duty to give back, in honor of those who taught and mentored me.
- Dr. Chelsea Finn, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University
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