Firstly, I’d like to apologize for my lack of updates recently. As many of you may guess, I’ve been more busy than our president (as my mom would describe it). With that, I’d like to use this blog post as a recap of all the cool things I’ve done in my first two years here at Brown, in reverse chronological order, that I never really would’ve imagined out of a college experience.
Part 1: Now (Sept 2016) – Sept 2015
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Finish a machine learning project in healthcare analytics, under IBM, with the goal of universally individualizing healthcare. As a result, I’ve obtained a sneak peek at what computing can do for the multi-trillion dollar healthcare industry, and it’s pretty awesome.
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Travel to Austin, TX and stay in a 4 star, 2-bed hotel room by myself, on IBM’s dime, present my project to fellow interns and management, and be questioned on my presentation by Rob High, the CTO and Vice President of IBM Watson. I also received compliments for, and further interest in, my presentation.
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Going on a boating tour of the NYC coastline with fellow interns and being unable to claim my free alcoholic drink *sadness*.
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Reverse-engineering a pseudo random number generator to be one of the first 50 to solve the last HackMIT entry puzzle (this took me 3 days and was both immensely frustrating and unbelievably satisfying).
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Playing ping pong nearly everyday during my time at IBM, finding a new hobby.
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Watching the UEFA champions league with the dinosaurs (wise researchers) at IBM Research, representing much of the world, during an “extended” lunch break. Hearing the researchers badmouth each other’s countries and teams was quite funny too.
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Discussing with co-interns about their research, being able to understand their research, offering suggestions on things to try, and realizing I could be a researcher too.
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Traveling to Austin, TX, on my own dime, for a friend’s graduation from UT.
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Accepting the role of a student leader for Bridges@Brown.
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Finish writing the Weenix operating system, supporting dynamic addressing. I wrote the processes and threads (and scheduling), some drivers, the virtual filesystem, the real filesystem (S5FS), and the virtual memory layer. Finally, I wrote fork() on top of everything else I wrote (scary right?). All this, and it sadly does not run minecraft. But it does do “hello_world” as well as general computing scripts, and! I can tell you how it all works, no magic.
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Accepting the role of Brown SPOC, becoming a student technical staff of sorts for Brown.
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Take a class called “20th Century Japanese Film and Animation”, basically a class on anime and its origination from / impact on Japanese culture.
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Take a class called “Graph Theory” which ended up being a crazy survey course of all other math, ‘cuz everything is a graph.
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Getting the best (8 person) suite on campus and living in it now, sharing a royalty double with my awesome roommate again.
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Solving company programming challenges effortlessly, and later failing easier problems just as effortlessly (this still confounds me).
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Flying to Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Seattle for Microsoft’s “Build the Shield” cybersecurity competition, having lots of fun with three friends, getting stuck in the Seattle airport for 12 hours for our return flight, due to tornadoes in Chicago cancelling all Southwest flights, red-eyeing a flight back to Providence in pairs, all during midterms week. Oh, did I mention we tried out the competition jff (just for fun) without any real experience before-hand and ended up qualifying anyways? It was great. Here’s the team photo.
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Attending my first hackathon, Hack@Brown, with a bunch of friends. Another team photo.
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Traveling to Edinburg, TX and staying with a friend’s family for Christmas / New Years.
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Surviving CS157 Algorithms (I talked about this struggle in some past blog post)
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Attending Korean BBQ with Bridges@Brown, with my roommate, in an attempt to “learn how to cook”.
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Taking an “Anthropology of China” class and learning about my own home country as well as interacting with other students interested in my culture for once.
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Traveling a bunch for on-site company interviews and realizing that some decisions and aspects in life (hiring politics, socioeconomic and racial disparities, hiring politics being a subset of socioeconomic and racial disparities) are beyond my control and how well I perform. And that’s ok. Well no, it’s _not_ ok, but rather I realize that sometimes (and for some, most of the time) it’s not me but rather the system around me, and that I’m not too harsh on _myself_ for such a system.
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Making the conscious choice to take classes beyond me, and not regretting it, despite continually wanting to regret it.