added blog post about academic journey reflections

Signed-off-by: Joel Niklaus <me@joelniklaus.ch>

_posts/academic-journey-reflections.md

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+layout: page 
+title: Reflections on my Academic Journey 
+date: 2024-08-17
+---
+
+# Reflections on my Last Conference and Academic Journey
+
+With the conclusion of #ACL2024 some reflections on my last conference of my PhD and the academic journey over the past
+four years.
+
+## 🤝 Conference
+
+The food at the conference was absolutely amazing! On the academic side, things got spicy beyond just the cuisine. There
+was a heated exchange after the second keynote on the reasoning and planning abilities of LLMs which added some
+unexpected drama to the mix.
+
+Attending conferences during my PhD was a highlight, especially since, as the only NLP researcher at the University of
+Bern, it was fantastic to connect with so many like-minded people.
+
+I am honored that the acting ACL president, Emily Bender, attended my oral presentation and actively engaged in the
+discussion. Her concerns about synthetic data use in the legal domain, though not directly applicable to our work, added
+an interesting dimension to the conversation. The exchange, while intense, was valuable to clarify our methods and
+contribute to robust academic discourse.
+
+Afterward, I had a great chat with Luca Soldaini about their paper OLMo. It’s fantastic to see this huge open science
+effort rewarded with a best paper award!
+
+## 🧑‍⚖️ Reviews
+
+Throughout my academic journey, peer review has been challenging and frustrating. Common issues included reviewers
+focusing solely on self-disclosed limitations, undervaluing dataset contributions, and requesting impractical
+experiments outside the research scope.
+
+It was particularly disheartening to receive inconsistent review scores and rejection decisions that completely
+disregarded our thorough rebuttals and additional experiments.
+
+I believe many have had similar experiences, which is why the positive feedback from reviewers on my last paper was so
+refreshing. One reviewer’s comment, "This is how a dataset paper should be written," made my day. The stellar
+meta-review score and the consideration for the best paper award were the cherry on top. This experience was a
+much-needed reminder of the rewarding aspects of academia, despite the often arduous process.
+
+## 🧑‍🔬 PhD Journey
+
+When students ask if pursuing a PhD is worth it, I reflect on my own experience. The journey was challenging, filled
+with long hours, late nights, and weekends working. Maintaining good mental health was tough, and the review process was
+incredibly frustrating.
+
+However, the rewards were significant. Earning a PhD opened many doors for me, granting access to opportunities that I
+might not have had otherwise. It allows me to work on topics that I find genuinely fascinating, travel to conferences,
+and enjoy the freedom to choose when and where I work. While the path is demanding, the benefits can be substantial,
+particularly if you are passionate about your field.
+
+## ⚖️ Legal NLP
+
+It was really nice talking to many researchers at the poster session. I think this may be a reflection of the surge in
+interest in applications to the legal domain over the last years.
+
+It is a very exciting time for legal NLP now, exemplified by so many legal AI startups being founded. When I started, we
+were still very limited by the methods available to us. For example, generative capabilities were very limited with
+models often still making grammar mistakes. Additionally, the context width was often limited to 512 tokens, making many
+applications in the legal domain, such as document drafting and summarization, infeasible. Finally, while models are
+still much worse multilingually compared to English, the situation is improving a lot. I am looking forward to seeing
+researchers tackle more and more difficult and real world legal tasks.
+
+Now I am very much looking forward to my next chapter in industry, more about this another time.
+
+Thanks to all my amazing mentors and collaborators along the way, especially Veton Matoshi, Ilias Chalkidis, Matthias
+Stürmer, Daniel E. Ho, and Garrett Honke.