Closure

by Qinyuan Ye, April 4, 2026.

Sometimes I envy AI, because people care about their unlearning, and it seems possible. Nobody cares about my unlearning—when something bad happens, I cannot unlearn; I can only make peace with it.

I felt small and invisible during my PhD. A week before the hooding ceremony, my advisor forgot he was supposed to hood me—though he remembered to do so for another student. As a founding member of the lab, and after seven years of collaboration, there is no way for me not to take it personally. Unfortunately, confusing incidents like this kept happening to me throughout my PhD.

It has been about a year since I graduated. To this day, I’m constantly triggered by small events that remind me of how those years were. I was told this is called rumination, and I was encouraged to find closure. This essay is my attempt.

What would be a nice closure to it? I searched for one so hard.

Finally, I recently made peace with myself by realizing that my 18-year-old self would be proud of what I have achieved. In 2015, she wrote in her college application that she wanted to study computer science to be at the frontier of technology. She wanted to be more than a spectator; she wanted to be a part of the change. In a way, she did.

Here are a few things I am proud of. Let this tiny “hall of achievement” be my closure.

I started my PhD for the sole purpose of doing research, and I fulfilled that promise to myself. I am truly proud of all three pieces of my thesis. I worked on these topics because I was genuinely curious; to me, this was like creating art, and I enjoyed the process.
My CrossFit paper partly led to advances in “Instruction Tuning”. Later, I created a workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following at NeurIPS 2023, which attracted over 100 submissions and hundreds of attendees.
Someone shared in a teaching evaluation that after taking the class I TA’ed, they decided to start doing research in machine learning. I received a thank-you email from halfway across the world for a lecture note I wrote.

I achieved a little more than that: I am now strong enough to give myself the closure I need.