Reflections: Undergrad

A long ramble about what the last four years taught me

I received the Best Outgoing Student Award today. A lot of people have seen the numbers, the papers, the GPA, the conferences, and I understand why those are the things that show up first. They're visible. They're countable. But they're also a very clean version of four years that was, in practice, not very clean at all.

This post will be going off on a slight tangent from the usual post, but any learning is still learning.

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The four years

I’ve been fascinated by neuroscience since I was about ten, so when I came across the words “artificial neuron” while choosing what to study, I didn’t need much more convincing. That’s not a small thing when you’ve spent years reading about how the brain works. The idea that there was a whole field trying to computationally model something like that, I was in immediately.

A few months into first year I took a beginner’s ML and data science course that ran after class hours. Just a small thing. And holy mother of god, I was not prepared for how much I loved it.
The statistics. The probabilities. The way information moved through equations. I fell in love with math all over again, but this time it was math doing something, math with a point. I remember going to the library specifically to look for ML books that were heavily worn, on the very sound logic that more worn out equals more used equals more useful xD
I found this green book, Introduction to Machine Learning by Alpaydin, and that book and I spent a lot of time together. By the end of first year I was playing around with different ML algorithms and feeling nothing but absolute joy. Even the hard parts were fun!

I remember coming in extra early too, to catch up on the other subjects because I’d spend every other class thinking about how the algorithms work xD

The neuroscience thread ran through all of it quietly. Once I started understanding ML properly I could see the connections forming, and the bridge I’d been trying to build since I was a kid started to look like something real. It properly clicked around fifth semester, and from that point the research direction found itself. The AAAI paper on predictive processing, the free energy principle work, the spiking neural networks, all of it traces back to a thread I’d been following since I was ten without knowing where it was going.

I got to learn so much about how neuroscience is crossing paths with tech. We’re genuinely living in some amazing times.

Fifth and sixth semester were something else entirely. In fifth sem I was working on two research papers simultaneously while taking three of BJD sir’s courses, which are known for their level of difficulty and technical depth. Sixth sem was even more: HPE internship alongside college, two more BJD subjects, two more research papers, and pushing my GPA above 9 all at the same time. It was genuinely chaotic. There were multiple nights where I questioned everything. What I learned from those semesters wasn’t that I could handle everything. It was that I could figure out what actually mattered and let the rest go.

I’d start writing notes at the beginning of the class, stop somewhere in the middle to listen, and then panic at the end because I’d forget to write while I was listening T-T

By seventh semester, after getting and offer from Couchbase, I was mentoring eight teams with their course projects, working on my own projects, and also, for the first time in eight years, genuinely resting. I took that window seriously. It was one of the better decisions I made.

Literally had the best time being TA for my favorite subject

BJD took a student with no papers and too many ideas and taught me how to actually do research. The intuition, the fundamentals, how to look at a problem and find what it’s actually asking underneath what it looks like it’s asking. Almost ten courses, TA-ing for AFML, twelve papers later, I carry how he thinks into everything I do.

The thing about those nights where I questioned everything is that I didn’t get through them alone. My family - my parents, sister, and Rohan were there for me through it all.
My parents have this specific way of showing up that I’ve never quite been able to describe. They don’t minimize what I’m feeling and they don’t let me spiral. They just sit with me in it until it passes. Rohan gave me reality checks and pushed me to prioritize obsessively, and even once sat with me before a final exam and helped me calculate my CGPA because I was completely convinced I was going to fail the subject. My sister, not even out of school yet, listened to me explain things she had no reason to understand, asked questions anyway, because she knew that hearing myself talk through something was how I figured out if I actually got it. She probably knows more about machine learning than she ever asked to xD

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What I know now that I didn’t in 2022

Four years is enough time to learn some things the hard way.

Grades don’t matter as much as everyone says, but please keep your grades. The GPA that I stopped stressing about is the one that actually went up. There’s a lesson there about how outcomes follow when you redirect the energy from anxiety into the actual work.

Find a mentor and actually talk to them. Not just when you need something. Regularly. Let them see how you think. Open yourself up to constructive criticism and pay extra close attention to all the guidance they give you along the way.

Never be the smartest person in the room. If you are, you’re in the wrong room. Find the room where you have to catch up. I learned more from being around people who were further along than I was than from almost anything else. That whole “I feel so stupid” is crazy good fuel to catch up and learn.

The instinct to say yes to everything and figure it out mid-jump is valuable early on. At some point you have to learn to say no with the same energy. The balance between exploration and exploitation is real and it shifts as you go (hehe rl ref).

If you find something you love, go completely in. No hedging. The things that have gone best for me are the ones I went all the way into without a backup plan for caring less about them.

Planning is genuinely fun. I know that sounds unhinged but it’s true. If you have six hours to chop a tree, the first four are for sharpening the axe. This is one of the things that has made the most concrete difference in how I work.

And finally, it’s okay to ask for help. I spent too long thinking that needing help was evidence of something being wrong with me. It isn’t. The people who got me to where I am are the people I asked things of and let in.

What I think about how it ended up

I’m proud of how things went. But I want to be careful about how I say that, because there’s a version of this post where it sounds like the award is the point, like the twelve papers and the conferences and the GPA recovery are the point, and that’s not quite right.

There’s a concept in Hindu philosophy that I keep coming back to, the idea that action is your duty and the fruits of that action are not yours to hold onto. To do things is my dharma. The work is the work.
Adi Shankaracharya, in his commentaries on the Upanishads, goes even further; he argues that the craving for outcomes is itself a form of avidya, a kind of ignorance, a mistaking of what the ego wants for what is actually real.
The Taittiriya Upanishad has this deceptively simple chant: aham annam, aham annadah, I am the food, I am the eater of food - which is trying to dissolve exactly that boundary, between the one who acts and the world the action moves through. I think what it’s pointing at is that when you stop hoarding the outcome, you’re actually more present to the doing.

The outcomes are good and I enjoy them, but they were never really mine in the way that people think you’re supposed to want things to be yours.

I walked into PES in 2022 convinced I had failed. What I know now is that things went the way they were supposed to go, not in some fated sense but in the simpler sense that I showed up to each thing in front of me and tried to do it well, and that accumulated into something. The Eddie Woo TED talk in tenth grade that got me to fall in love with math. The green Alpaydin book. The words “artificial neuron” in a course list. The beginner ML course after school hours. Each one a small thing that led somewhere.

The person who walked in in 2022 would probably be pretty surprised. I think she’d also recognize it, though, because it was always going to be something. She just didn’t know what yet.

That’s maybe the most honest thing I can say about four years at PES: I didn’t know what yet. Now I do, a little more, and I get to find out what comes next :D