Hi there! Just my second post for the year but I believe now is the right time to share some important moments and learnings from the past few months.
It's been a great year. Finally, I will be graduating this December after 3 years of overloading myself with courses and other work. Was it all worth it? Yes, it really was. The past one and a half years, since I have been in CSE, have been tough but what I am taking away is the understanding and belief that I would be able to overcome any challenge I face once I am out there. I feel great about the fact that I was able to expand my interests beyond CSE and continue to listen to podcasts (even attempted making one), read more and more books, learn about personal finance, contribute to open-source software, and learn from some great minds over at Harvard and MIT (which I plan to continue doing). Making big decisions is never easy, especially when you are deciding which would be your first workplace out of college. Sometimes I feel I am overthinking the decision and I try to stay off from doing that but it is never easy. I remember just a year back I was trying to decide on where should I intern for the summer and looking back at it I feel so happy about my decision. I am nervous but also really excited to see what the final result is going to be. Two great things that I am doing in my last quarter make me really happy. First, I stepped out of my comfort zone and took cryptography instead of any other easy class just before graduating and second I have navigated the challenges from the graduate level class I am TAing really well. Initially, it was intimidating to see so many graduate students coming to my Office Hours to ask me conceptual/homework questions but as the quarter progressed, I eased in the role well (so much that I always end up extending my OH beyond the normal hours). I have also tried to keep up with learning more and more about personal finance over the past 6 months as that is an important part of adult life and I feel happy that I got serious about it before graduating. Learning Rust has been a big thing for me this quarter and I am trying to get better at it by doing more questions in it and publishing my own crate (package). I do believe that golang and rust would get bigger over the next decade. Dedicating my college success to my over-anxious parents who have been there cheerleading me the entire way.
0 Comments
Hi there! Hope you had a better winter than I did.
It has been some ride over the past three months. Not only was I taking three CS course: Database Internals, Intro to Algorithms, and NLP but also, I was working constantly in my independent research to get better results on few-shot learning scenarios. No offence to the instructors or the classes I was taking but the most interesting part of the quarter for me was the research. I was able to make some interesting breakthroughs during my research that I plan to take forward over the Spring. Moving on from the UW, I am back at Harvard now working at metaLAB to tackle ways of using deep learning with art collections to have visitors see a new side to the collections at hand. I am so excited to be working on this project and hope to have a substantial contribution during my time here. For this reason, I have taken the spring quarter off from the UW and plan to work at metaLAB for next 12 weeks. I then plan on going back to Seattle for the summer for an internship at Hulu. The past two quarters have been very tough in terms of amount of time I had to put it, but I love the results that I have got through them. During my time here, I wish to learn some Rust and Mandarin. I really hope that I can give proper time to both. Hoping to keep everyone updated :) Hi there! I am back after a very long quarter for not a conventional update blog post. I will be sharing details about what I have been up to for the past three months, but this post is about something more than just these past three months.
This past year has been a memorable. Perhaps the defining year of my life till now and it was not just due to the success I had professionally but also because of factors in my personal life. I started off the year with a huge smile, happy about the over 2-year long relationship I had been in of which over 1 year was long distance. End of January, things took a bad turn and I felt broken. Throughout February, things never appeared to get better and perhaps I even cried myself to sleep all the nights during that period, but I did take a wise decision. What possibly is most un-Indian thing I could have done (because of the stereotypical definition of ‘man’ people bind to), I decided to go to my college counsellor and pour it all out in front of her. I didn’t know what to expect but it did make a huge difference along with some subsequent appointments. There are many things that came out of that experience and I am not here today to tell you the details of each day during that period or how it all happened but of the things that followed. Going into that period, I did not have the major of my choice, an on-campus job, or a summer internship. By the time I came out of it, I had achieved all three of them. I was happy that I had not let the most challenging experience affect my academics or my professional plans. Today, as I am writing down this post, I can say that I had the best experience of my life this past summer at Library Innovation Lab at Harvard and this past quarter, the two graduate level classes I took, Machine Learning and Deep Learning did not disappoint. I am happy to share that this coming spring I will be going back to Harvard to work on an Art and Deep Learning project and interning at a big tech company upcoming summer in addition to starting out Deep Learning research from next quarter onwards. I never felt too elated by the good results I achieved before this year and the same was true when I got into my major or the job/internship opportunities for this past summer but it is only now that I realize and start to feel proud of myself for the first time of what I have been able to achieve. I want to conclude my story by telling everyone that yes, things do get hard and giving up seems the easiest option but persisting and getting to the things at the end of it have made me the person that I am today. Thank you for reading this post. Hope you have a great holiday season! P.S. – I spared all the technical stuff I did this quarter, but it will up in ‘About’ section soon. Hi everyone! I am back again to give you updates about past month.
My time in India after returning from Harvard was great. I was finally able to spend a ton of time with my parents and drown in unhealthy (and calorific) Indian food after a long time. Since I live in Agra now, I made a trip to the Taj Mahal, which I feel is overhyped compared to so many other monuments and locations that India has to offer. Now I am back at the University of Washington to start my third year. It is surprising how fast the past two years have passed by and how important they have been in my development as an individual - academically and personally. This quarter, I look forward to taking Advanced Machine Learning and Deep Learning in addition to Data Structures. I am excited that the former two classes are project-based, which means this quarter I would be doing research work on two topics that have fascinated me for many months now. My heavy schedule might have me not being able to remain active much over the website but I invite anyone who has any questions/comments to reach out to me from the About Me page on the website. I also started being active again on Twitter again @Satvik_Sh. I will try my best to let everyone know of the projects I work on over the upcoming months. |