I have survived a semester of grad school (yay). In summary, in the past semester:

  • I spent way too long trying to find an advisor. After a bit of looking it random professors’ webpages and emailing people to see if they need students in their lab, I did finally find someone who was willing to take a hopeless grad student into their lab (yay). Even better, the lab were doing research topics I didn’t even know existed until a couple of months ago (see: federated learning, and Bayesian optimisation).

  • Since the research area was very new to me, I also did a large amount of paper-eating and lecture note-reading to catch up. I still haven’t managed to do that completely yet tho (I also don’t know how people do this, and not get tired of reading - I don’t even want to read anything after reading a lot of papers).

  • I also almost failed a class lol. Maybe not that close but I did mess up a final project quite heavily (z-value < -2) but fortunately did get a passing grade in the end. Turns out the only thing I can do in CS was algorithms (which was the other class I took).

  • I got intimidated by the other grad students (or as the cool kids would say, felt like an imposter among us). That was fun.

  • Some exploration of Singapore was also done, since I guess I won’t have time later on. Also the country is small so it doesn’t take long to do all that.

So yeah, it’s all good so far.