Highlights
Failures
I just wrapped up my first semester of college studying computer science @ The University of Waterloo
It was a change of pace from the routines I had set myself up for since May. Life was mostly just waking up, skipping school (at this point I had already my acceptances or had graduated), heading downtown to work on projects, being at the WOMBO office, or some event
Add the occasional teenage shenanigans and travels to NYC, SF, and Chicago — and I would consider my senior summer a great period
I was working, learning, travelling, and had freedom. I was just starting to develop deeper relationships with friends and family, gain more expertise on productionizing models at scale, and also finally feel like I was establishing who am I both to myself and others in tech
But change is inevitable, and I was plopped 3 hours away from home in the great tri-city of Kitchener-Waterloo
While I originally was very excited to get into Waterloo and also attend the school, I found that I had developed a lot more agency over the summer. Instead of being excited to meet new people and live on my own through college, I was worried that I was giving up a lot of the momentum I had built for myself over the past couple of months
Orientation week was a fun distraction away from that — anyone and everyone stepped in my dorm at some point to play 2k or poker — but I fell into a rut when classes started
I missed my friends abroad that I shared meaningful memories with. I missed the feeling of having a hard problem I'd wake up every day to tackle at work. I missed the feeling of doing stuff my way. Math and CS courses felt super rigid in the way they forced me to think and solve problems. I didn't like school because it felt unfamiliar to what I was doing for the past months
Maybe that's the point though, maybe the value of education is not that it's supposed to be familiar. Maybe school isn't supposed to teach you the "essential" stuff like doing your taxes. Maybe the purpose of school is to expose you to new ideas that help develop epistemologies for those who call themselves lifelong learners
I kind of eternalized this through CS 145. While a very difficult course, it went over programming concepts I was already familiar with (recursion, trees, Big O, RAM, etc)
What was unique about it though was re-learning these concepts and gaining a new perspective on my intuition. Big O is something we can mathematically prove. There are different types of recursion and ways to generalize them
There are different ways to learn the same concept — only when we realize this and retrace our steps do we fill the holes in our knowledge
My big brain realization was also attributed to an interview I had done this term for the Cansbridge scholarship. My interviewer (shoutout to my Persian برادر Ali ) would ask me to explain Stable Diffusion. Then explain denoising. Then explain what noise even is. Then explain what a Gaussian distribution is
He did a real-time depth-first search on what my untapped knowledge was. While frustrating at the moment, and I wouldn't recommend recruiters do the same thing, it ended up being a transformative experience