Winter 2024 Quarter Class Review
Published:
My second quarter at UW! Summary: grant writing takes longer than you think.
The Reviews
- A Psych 504: Core Concepts in Behavioral Neuroscience
- A-Psych 523: Laboratory in Statistical Computation 2
- A- Psych 525: Linear Models and Data Analysis
- Cr Psych 550: Seminar in Psychology
- Cr ☆ Psych 545: Advances in Cognition/Perception
- Cr Psych 552: Seminar in Behavioral Neuroscience
Other Commitments:
- writing the Royalty Research Fund grant.
- working on the materials + presenting the OpenFHE Logistic Regression Tutorial at AAAI 2024 in Vancouver.
Retrospective
Grad Student Life
- Writing the RRF grant helped me grow as a Ph.D. student. It forced me to think about my project from multiple angles, made me to be less “fast and loose” with details, and guided my research path. Writing a grant feels drastically different from writing a paper: with a grant, you are planning out your future work and charting a course while being forced to situate your research within the body of work, whereas a paper is more of a retrospective on “here’s what we did to achieve this outcome.”
Classes
I should have placed out of 523 and 525; I got the impression that we would be focusing on GLMs and the theory behind them (insofar as related to psychology analysis), but we didn’t really cover any of that. At the very least, I’m done with the psych stats sequence.
Psych 545 taught me a lot about the Cerebellum and its role in more than just motion. I also had the opportunity to dive deep into Cognition and Perception, which, while not for me, were still fun to learn about.
Misc.
OpenFHE took more time than I expected, but I’m glad I did it. In addition to the interesting talks that I had the opportunity of attending, Vancouver is a gorgeous city, and I really enjoyed walking around and exploring. Also, I met an interesting group from UW Tacoma, and I’m hoping to do some in-my-free-time PPML work with them.
This quarter I was involved in the visit-week for the potential students, and it was illuminating to be on the other side of the table. I also had the opportunity to present my work to the group, which generated some fun discussions and ideas.