What I learned publishing a paper | Ram JanarthanSkip to contentLinkedIn GitHub Instagram

What I learned publishing a paper<br>11.07.2026 — musings — 5 min read<br>In August 2024 I enrolled in a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Edinburgh with no prior research experience, and in April 2026 I published my first research paper at a reputed conference hosted in the US, studying how AI models learn languages.1 In this post I want to share the story of how I did it. This is not a post on how to write a good research paper; instead I want to share some ways of thinking that helped me achieve something difficult that mattered to me.

Below I've illustrated a timeline of events that occured between enrolling in college and publishing. At each point plotted, I describe what I was doing based on notes that I took at the time and on the y-axis, I've represented 'visibility', which captures how clearly I felt I could see my actions directly leading to achieving the end goal of publishing.

050100visibilityAug-Dec 2024Jan–Feb 2025March-April 2025Summer 2025June 2025Late Aug 2025Sept 2025Oct 2025Nov 2025Jan 2026Feb 2026Apr 202630

Aug-Dec 2024. I enrolled in the program and took a natural language processing (NLP) class in my first semester. I also wrote my first literature review and learned research basics like how to structure research notes and use software to organise papers (shout-out Zotero). I was enthusiastic, and doing well in my classes seemed like a reasonable milestone.

Jan–Feb 2025. For my summer dissertation requirement, I applied to work on a topic with my NLP professor since I'd enjoyed her class and found her work interesting. Securing a good dissertation project was the next milestone.

March-April 2025. I got allocated her project, and spent March and April turning a rough dissertation topic into a full proposal alongside her and a PhD student advisor. I focused on trying to bring something meaningful to every weekly update meeting, and learned how to read and deconstruct a paper. My proposal was well received, and I was pumped for the work ahead.

Summer 2025. From May to August I did the groundwork for my research: forming hypotheses, running experiments, and reading papers, figuring much of it out as I went, under the guidance of my professor and PhD student advisor. The next milestone was to write and submit a great dissertation that I would be proud of.

June 2025. A visiting professor, who was a senior author of the paper my study was based on, was in Edinburgh to give a talk. I attended it and pitched a one-on-one meeting with them to share my work. They received it well and liked my ideas, which boosted my conviction that this work was atleast somewhat novel, though I still didn't know if it was paper-worthy.

Late Aug 2025. I submitted my dissertation, happy with it after a marathon final day of polishing arguments. When I asked my professor if it could be a paper, she gave the fair answer that it had potential but needed far more work and guidance than the summer had allowed. Because of everyone's busy timelines and my own uncertainty regarding what I was doing after graduation, it was unclear to me when and whether this would actually happen.

Sept 2025. With the dissertation submitted and the MSc program completed, I didn't know what my next step was. I decided to keep reading the literature and improve my understanding of what my results meant in the context of the field. At this time, I also moved back to Chennai, my hometown in India.

Oct 2025. I remembered the visiting professor's interest in my work, and shot them an email of my completed dissertation; they liked it, and I asked if they'd be interested in extending this work together. I drafted a paper with a plan to improve it and sent them an email, CC'ing my professor and PhD student advisor-turned-collaborator. After some discussion, we decided that it was best to continue this work without the involvement of the visiting professor, due to this project being an extension of my dissertation.

Nov 2025. Back in Edinburgh for my graduation ceremony, I met with my professor and PhD student collaborator to discuss our next steps. We aligned on the framing of the paper and follow-up experiments to conduct once I was back from an upcoming holiday. It finally felt like we were moving forward again, and I was getting closer to the goal.

Jan 2026. In January, I ran more experiments to round out our existing results and refined drafts of the paper with the professor and PhD student collaborator. Later in the month, we settled on a target conference with a February deadline and for the first time in the whole journey, I could see the finish line.

Feb 2026. February was a intense push — sharpening arguments, plotting figures, and assembling everything in our LaTeX template. My collaborators made invaluable contributions and I learned an enormous amount in a short time. Watching it come together and submitting...