Well here we are. Its 2020, another year/decade. I didn’t do a review last year but hopefully starting this year I’ll try to be more conscious about it.

Things that happened

• January
  • ML fellowship at fellowship.ai
  • 2nd semester in OMSCS - Reinforcement Learning and Machine Learning for Trading
• February / March
  • Externship at fellowship.ai
  • Opportunity to shift to MSCS on campus
• April / May / June / July
  • Taking time off from studying
• August
  • Moved to Atlanta
  • 3rd semester at Georgia Tech - Machine Learning / Deep Learning for Videos / Computer Vision
• September / October
  • Summer Internship Hunt
  • Interviewed at Amazon Robotics / Neosis / Worthix / Credit Karma
• November
  • Internship offer from Worthix
• December
  • Wrapping up semester
  • Studying up on AlphaGO - MCTS / UCT

Reflections for 2019

I started a master’s program to just get my foot into machine learning jobs, but honestly those 60 odd questions I solved on leetcode gave me the confidence I was lacking in my earlier job hunt than the masters program itself. Thinking back if I had just interviewed back in Bangalore for a bunch of roles, things could’ve been different.

Next Year

Search for a full time Job (2021)

Looking for a full time job in machine learning. Have to grind leetcode. Things I’m looking for

• Competitive pay
• Well defined role
  • I don’t want to be another engineer working on the next item on the board.

Work on an Idea

I’ve had this itch to work on something that could potentially lead to a startup. The whole point I got in machine learning was to build more intelligent AI for games. I’ve gotten side-tracked a into going deeper into ML without thinking about why I got into it. The more time I put into ML, the more I realize I don’t need it.

Some of the ideas I have are mostly around

• improving productivity / journaling.
• A Procedurally generated game.
• A Recommendation system for things.

Thinking Long Term

I’ve been thinking longer about what I really want to do. Most of my decisions are with a time horizon of at most a year. Beyond that I’m just hoping life will take its course. Even when I do plan for things in longer term (i.e doing masters) I overthink them. In hindsight some of the decisions I had made were so inconsequential, I could’ve been doing something that I actually like instead.

• I also want to start thinking about getting moderately fit (yes its cliche I know). Just thinking about it financially makes so much sense its probably the best time investment I could make.
• How much money do I really need and planning accordingly. My expenses right now are rent / food / tuition but actively thinking about the kind of expenses I could end up with would help me plan better.
• Start thinking about relationships. There’s a fat chance I’d be married by the end of 2022 so I’ll need to keep that in mind for future decisions. Or who knows…

I’ll keep the blog updated check out my other posts. I mostly write about the ideas I’m working on / random personal things.

Thanks for the read!