A Reflection of My Past Two Years: Grad School Edition

Last updated Oct 14, 2024

• Writing

Picture taken when I accidentally went to the freshman orientation

Why am I writing this

It’s been a while since I updated my personal website. I am now in my final semester of grad school. Now that I am wrapping the final few classes (possibly of my entire life), it might be a good time to recap and put a tie on the past few years of my studies and life. Plus, this is the perfect way for me to procrastinate on my thesis 🙈.

Less than two years ago, I accepted my offer to pursue graduate studies at UIUC. Looking back, the past one and a half years were some of my most defining times and changed my perspective on many things in my life. Some of my experiences have drastically changed how I view my life moving forward, both personal and professional.

The next two months will also most likily be my final two months ever in school. This post is also a goodbye to my love-hate relationship with the education system.

As mentioned in my previous post, doing a Masters was a good way to determine whether a PhD was something I would pursue. It turns out, the answer was no. There are a variety of factors into why I decided on this.

Although 💸 is definetly a major factor in my decision, I think at a certain point, I was finally burnt out of school. Work will definetly still be stressful but after 18(ish) years of school, the routine finally got to me. One thing I have to highlight however is that a Masters Program can be very different from undergrad and a PhD even more so (talk more about this below). At the end of the day however, the heavy time and emotional commitment of a PhD program is no longer something I am interested in.

Does this mean that my past one and half years of Masters is wasted? 100 percent not. I was able to meet some amazing people, work on some super cool projects and travel to a bunch of places across the U.S. If I had the option to do it all over again, I would still choose to pursue my degree.

One interesting difference between graduate school (PhD even more so than masters) compared to undergrad is the difference in duties and routine. For an undergraduate student, almost all of your time is spent on learning, which is basically repeating or doing things that others have already done. For a grad student, a lot of time is now spent on exploring new directions and trying out new things. Your classes also reflect that. Many graduate classes are now seminar style classes that feature papers on state-of-the-art work that inspire students to work on new research projects. These classes are also almost all extremely bird, in order to make more time for research.

Going to SF to Give Talk on Undergraduate Research

During my time at UIUC, I did work on a few really cool projects and really have to thank my advisor( Lingming Zhang) and PhD mentors ( Jiawei and Steven) for their support. In the end tho, I realized this isn’t the direction for me (due to reasons mentioned above) but is definetly something I might want to revisit in the future (hopefully not when I am too old tho).

Not a lot of people showed up :(, still fun tho

I definetly had a great work life balance in school, especially for a graudate student. Like previously mentioned, graduate classes are almost all extremely bird and after securing my job and internship, the rest of my time is almost entirely spent between doing fun things and research (I didn’t do that much research 🙃). I got to travel to a bunch of places, meet a lot of cool people and play way too much League (my hands hurt). As a student in a college town, meeting new people and making friends is still definetly convinent, the loneliness of adulthood is definetly something I am not looking forward to.

Trip to New York During Spring Break

After graduating, I will be working as a Software Engineer at Databricks in Bellevue. If you are reading this (which I doubt anyone actually is), feel free to hit me up if you are ever in town.