After passing the exams, I was lucky to join NLP lab as a PhD candidate. It was on April's Fool, Anno Domini 2001.
Entering the world of NLP
Engineering Department was a whole different story when compared to what I have experienced before. Everything has to be proved empirically. Older students help younger colleagues. Three year paper is probably too old paper. Forget about books, they are out of date before being printed...
Reading, programming, learning, debugging, experimenting, reading again... Very tough, but positively challenging. Without solid background I had to bet on new topics and started WWW era in our lab (fighting with criticism was tough, but now I am double satisfied as almost all my colleagues work now with text data retrieved from the Internet).
