During COVID-19, I started working on problems focussed on understanding human behavior during unusual situations that arose during COVID-19. I was increasingly fascinated with the role of Natural Language Processing (NLProc) in Computational Social Science. I found myself taking inspiration from theories in psychology more often. Overall, it was just a completely new world and I loved it. However, there was a small problem. I found myself often stuck, lacking the perspective of social science studies and was limited to finetuning large language models (LLMs). This motivated me to look for research groups working at the intersection of CSS and NLProc. After considering the expanding job opportunities in CSS/NLProc, my own interest and the advantage of a truly interdisciplinary global research experience, I decided to look for postdoc opportunities. I started applying in Jan 2022. After numerous applications and rejections, I finally received postdoctoral fellowship offers from University of Pennsylvania, The Alan Turing Institute and Aalto University. It’s been almost a month since I landed in Philadelphia for my postdoc at University of Pennsylvania. And, I am so glad to share that the journey has been full of learning and quite a few challenges. Through this post, I would like to share a few points which I found helpful during my application process.
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