2023-2024 yearly summary

2024-06-16

Hi, today I turn 22! Many things happened this year, and I think this is one of the most important year of my life so far.

graduation ceremony My graduation ceremony, by my mom

School and work

First of all, I finally graduate from college! It was an interesting experience. Covid has cut my in-person college short by one year, so it feel rather quick that all of a sudden I'm exiting out of college.

It is also the first time that I've experience a LARGE graduation ceremony. There were 7000 graduates students this year, and they spend almost 30 minutes on giving certificates to the phd students alone.

However, graduating does not mean that my academic journey is over, because for the next 1-2 years I will studying for a master of computer science degree at Northwestern University. I will be going from one purple school to another.

Looking back at the past year, I'd say that my senior year is when i experienced the most growth. I wanted to be able to eliminated the things I don't know I don't know. so I started attending colloquiums and seminars and learn about academic research on topic such as robotics, AI, international policies and marine biology.

I also completed my graduating capstone project. It was on the topics of AR/AI in healthcare and it has taught me many valuable lessons in regards to teamwork. The capstone ended okayish. I guess the biggest lesson that i've learned from this project is to know when to have meetings and when not to. As a developer, meetings should be alloted of co-programming and solving bugs. As a manager, meetings should be made to coordinating, future planning and set goals. An inefficient use of meeting would be to repeatedly do the sale pitch to the people who's already on board on the idea. Wasting the time of your workers ia good way of making them leave.

Finally, some interesting courses i've taken is

  • INFO 371 advance data science methods with ott
  • INFO 443 Software architecture with Alexander Bell-Towne
  • INFO 351 Information ethics and policy Katherine Cross
  • CLAS 101 Current use of greek and latin in English
  • CLAS 205 bioscientific vocabulary building from latin and greek
  • ACCTG 205 Essentials in accounting

Life and relationship

My relationship with Alieen is still going strong. Obviously my graduation add a lot of complications to the equation, but no biggie. We will strive through.

I also got my first car. A used Toyota Venza. Since I just got it, I haven't named it. However, I'm sure it will be my loyal war-rig for the next phase of my life.

Personal achievement

This year wasn't the most technical year for me due to completing graduation requirement and grad school application. However, I managed to

  • building and testing simple muti-layer perceptron and CNN using tensorflow.
  • Learn about software design patterns. Analyze and refractor my previous website codebase.
  • Build uni, my personal automation cli using rust.

Beyond the technical, I've also managed learn to use a swath personal management tool and techniques. This proofs to be a wonderful improvement to life. So much so that I've managed to be on the dean's list all through out this school year.

Goal for next year

  • Successfully find internship in either seattle or California.
  • Take courses in distributed systems and deep learning at a gradate level.
  • Decided which track I will need to pursue to finish my graduate degree at Northwestern. Be it the project track, or the research paper track.
  • Continue my relationship with Aileen
  • Keep swimming and exercising
  • Each health, drink more water and sleep no later than 12am.

So thats about it. See you next year!