Fall 2020

Here I am, in Virginia — a couple of hundred miles from Ithaca. The semester begins in September 2020. I’m finally starting on the long-awaited PhD — something that I’ve been musing about for years. This chapter is going to be full of unknowns, especially in the midst of a pandemic.

Let me try to start from the beginning. I will be frank and say that the first week was quite the rough start for me. I was a TA for the Introduction to Machine Learning class (CS 4780), and the first week involved all of the teaching staff trying to figure out how to make this remote semester of teaching work. It was a mad scramble to get the preliminary exam and first problem set up-and-running in less than a week.

Oh, and I was running around (virtually) trying to attend four classes at once (which I suppose is better than running around in real life!). It was pretty intense.

However, as things are apt to do, they eventually started to work out. The TAing became more streamlined, I zoomed in on the class I wanted to take (Matrix Computations — CS 6210), and I was finally able to focus on the most important activity of all in a PhD — research!

I got to know my advisor, through Zoom calls and such. I attended group meetings.

The actual process of research could be exciting, but sort of felt like blindly navigating through a dark cave, except with some essential lighting coming from my advisor (+the other students in the lab, whenever I got to interact with them).

Getting to know the other students in the program was a challenge. Thankfully, Cornell’s CS PhD has a mentorship program that pairs first-year students with existing students in the program. And I was lucky to be assigned to a great mentor who happens to work in a similar field to my own. Our conversations kept me sane!

At this point, I wasn’t interacting much with the other first-years. That would come later, after a bit of courage.

So I suppose the theme of the fall was learning the ropes (and figuring out how to balance the activities of the PhD)?

Spring 2021

So I was still in Virginia at this point!

I finally willed my introverted self to go to the (virtual) first-year socials, which happen over Zoom. And they’re pretty good! It’s really important to build connections with the other students in the department. And we first-years have the benefit of a shared pandemic PhD experience. Yet alas, it still takes some effort every week for me to go.

I got to know my PhD mentor more, since we shared a class (Deep Probabilistic and Generative Models — CS 6785) this semester (woo!). We even gave a presentation together (on meta-RL)!

I was a remote TA for the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence class (CS 4700). After the experience of last semester, it wasn’t too difficult to do things remotely for another class. Although late-night grading sessions on Fridays (and sometimes weekends) were a bit of a doozy sometimes, the fact that they were a shared experience made them easier to handle. I really liked developing problems for the problem sets and exams (although I had a nagging feeling that my problems were not creative enough — maybe a case of overly high expectations for myself?)

Meanwhile, I did my best to figure out my research direction and press forward, but balancing research with other activities was still a challenge. Looking back on it from now (August 2021), it does feel like a bit of a blur. But I did continue to make progress on the project that I began the previous semester. Maybe not as much as I would have liked, but that’s okay!

The end of the semester was a little chaotic, as TA and class responsibilities in particular began to pile up, but it wrapped up relatively smoothly.

And then it was onto the summer, which presented itself as a time to dedicate myself fully to research (without the constraints of classes or TAing).

[And that’s a wrap — on to year 2 (already)! I look forward to seeing what life is like in Ithaca and on campus, although that will have to wait for the time being.]