Spring 2025 Quarter Class Review

Summary: I was unbelievably busy and I paid for it (and it paid off?)

The Reviews

• A+ : ☆ BIOL 497B: Data-driven methods in computational neuroscience
• Cr : Seminar in Cognition and Perception Some research credits, masters thesis credits that shouldn’t really factor in.

Other Commitments:

Presenting at PyCon and doing a part-time internship back in Homomorphic Encryption.

Retrospective

Grad Student Life

This quarter was my roughest quarter at UW, but also (probably) the most fulfilling. I was the most productive I’ve been in a long time and I attribute that to spacing out my time across different endeavors. In terms of research, I was focused on one main project and one side project (two, actually, but I moved from one to the other), and there was the internship (but more on that at the bottom).

This quarter I mentored two undergrads (well, one recent graduate and a current undergraduate) on two separate projects, which was a fulfilling experience. The projects made great headway and, as corny as it sounds, I think I learned as much from them as they learned from me; I think that all Ph.D. students should mentor undergraduates (and maybe even early Ph.D. students) - you gain a new perspective and it keeps you from being stuck in an isolation bubble (which can easily happen to computationalists). There were days where I would be lost in my own head thinking about a problem, and I only got “pulled out” because I had a research meeting, an assignment, or a standup for my internship.

Classes

This quarter, much like the last, I took BIOL 4976B, a special topics class taught by the legendary Bing W. Brunton, who was a wealth of knowledge. The class was structured differently from most classes, and worked primarily on the honor system and consistent group work to “keep you honest” in terms of the progress you’re making; there were no homeworks, no quizzes, and no final exam. All in all, I got what I wanted, which was to fill gaps in my Neuroscience knowledge. Having said that, if I were not motivated by external factors like research, I might not have learned as much as I did in the class. The lack of homeworks or assignments (other than the final presentation and literature report) meant that it was easy to coast and let this class drop by the wayside, and there was definitely a week and a half where I fell (far) behind and had to catch up in a mad dash. I’m being hypocritical because my main interest in the class was how free-form it was; I figured that the freedom and lack of structure would pair well with my busy quarter, and I was right.

Also, this quarter was really special because I’m finally done with all my classes! I’m off to the races and hopefully by the next quarterly review, I’ll be done with my general exams and gearing up to teach!

Misc.

In terms of the aforementioned internship, I was spending about 20 hours a week working on some C++ and software for open-sourcing a homomorphic encryption library. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as the company ended up folding, which was a shame. I really had high hopes for the future of the library and the company. Being able to jump back and forth between my research and work here was a blessing in disguise - it was (probably) more consistent work than being a TA for a class (as opposed to 10 hours one week and then 30 the next), and I could jump in and out easily by just changing my tmux session.

Although my research output was high and I was very pleased with myself, I think the highlight was that I got to go back to Pittsburgh with my brother and teach at PyCon, which was just so much fun. Don’t get me wrong, I love being in academia, but hopping back into industry and interacting with lots of people and learning about the problems they work on was so much fun. We ended up teaching about 20 people (all the course material is open-sourced: numpy-to-jax) and the feedback was positive overall, which was a relief considering we had our first practice run literally at 11pm the night before and we stayed up till about 3.

See y’all in 3 months 😎