The First One from Ambrica

Just finished one semester at Cornell University! A lot has happened in my life since I came to the US, but I guess this is the first time I told my lazy ass to actually resume blogging duties. In fact, I am going to make it a point to blog more from now on, with a stronger focus on what work I am involved with at Cornell and elsewhere.

Its beautiful outside my window; pure white snow on the streets and sidewalks, and the icing on the cake - the sun has come out! Skies look clear so it promises to be a nice day. The weather here is drastically different than back home, but I have now become used to the cold. Ithaca definitely reminds me a lot about Gandhinagar. Its small, not many places to hang out (well in Ithaca's defense, it is WAY more happening than G'nagar), but I like it. I think because of its size, everything seems so near over here.

This semester I took courses in Information Retrieval, Machine Learning and Distributed Computing. Also did a project with the Live Objects team, which I will continue over the winter break and into the next semester. All the work was quite challenging at first, but I managed to cope with it. Generally, I always look back on a semester and think I should have done so much better in this and that, but this time I don't have many complaints with myself.

Machine Learning's coding assignments in the beginning were the biggest challenge. It felt great finally solving the recursion problem I was facing (inserting into the left most child of the tree, and if that subtree has reached a terminal node, then branch to the right) Live Objects presented a challenge of its own, since it was all on a language I hadn't used before, and they use a lot of their own APIs and libraries. Must admit though, that I was lazy intermittently when it came to LO work, which explains why Krzys wasn't that happy with our (me and Umang worked together) work, quantitatively. Umang doesn't seem to enjoy this LO work at all, so I think I will probably work alone in the next semester.

A rude awakening was the job hunting. I realised that I am just not that good when it comes to solving programming questions off the cuff. I end up making stupid decisions (like in Amazon's interview "We would need a 2-D string array to store the words for the digits" haha, that was so silly! The task was to convert any number from 0 to 999,999 into words) I am determined to work hard over the winter break on my algorithms and programming knowledge.

As far as my perception of myself goes, I have become stronger in character. I am not afraid to speak my mind, I display common sense under pressure and I still work hardest when I am faced with a deadline :-) That needs to change. I think LO will help me a bit with that, I will have to keep working on it daily (going to develop something with Azure services next semester) which will bring some regularity to my schedule. Something which would be difficult but I definitely want to push myself towards, is talking to professors, preparing myself before classes and raising interesting points during lectures. If I can achieve this, then I am sure I would be much closer to my goal of securing a great job.