I am delighted that my first semester at UTD has ended! It’s now a good time to look back. This post will cover 2 major aspects – academic and life.

Academic

My academic life has three aspects: coursework, teaching assistantship, and research.

Coursework

I took three course this semester. The first two courses are prerequisits, which means they are supposed to be taken in undegrad already. Funnily, the last course is one of the hardest course in my PhD program. I had to take it because my two prerequisits block me from taking any other courses, except for this hard one.

CS5343 classroom

So in CS5343 Data Structure and Algorithms, I already knew more than 50% of the knowledge since my highschool. That is also the reason why I was waived from taking it in undergrad. And sadly, the administration at my undergrad was not well-coordinated, so my new school thinks I am not qualified to skip that course. But anyway, I at least learned something new (e.g., Red Black Tree, Double Hashing, B-Tree, and Radix Sort). This class is also the biggest class I’ve been in in my life so far – about 80-90 students. Especially, the final exam was too tedious that only one student submitted the work before the time was due. I was the second one – I submitted when there is still one 6-point question to answer and the time was just over. My grade for that was 84/100, which meant I did make 10-point worth of mistakes along the way also. Can you guess my final grade?

In CS5348 Operating System Concepts, I really enjoyed the experience. Although this is a prerequisit course, I never leanred anything about it before because my undergrad CS program did not offer it LOL. This topic is very practical because it underlies all computer systems these days. I feel so satisfied to learn how all programs are abstracted as processes; how concurrency works via threads, mutexes and semaphores; how the bytes from a disk is used to store files; how the file system is actually organized; and so much more. The projects in the course mostly focus on extending an actual operating system - xv6. My C programming skill also improved a lot after this. Finally, shout out to the professor of this course who cares a lot about his student’s learning.

Finally, CS6382 Theory of Computation is a very challenging course to almost all of my classmates. Interestingly, they are mostly senior PhD students. The course is taught my an actual expert in the field, but he goes through things very fast. One time, I saw the best student in the class wrote in his note something like “WTF is he talking about? I don’t understand a single thing”. For me, although I don’t like some of the lectures, I learned a lot from this course. Learning with the professor of this course is like talking with your grandpa – you don’t understand a lot of things, and you learn something very precious. I am now confident when talking with people about the theories of computation. Do you know that whether P=NP is very likely to be a lacked axiom of our logic system, not something to be proved?

Teaching Assistantship

To earn money, I worked as a TA. The hourly salary of this job is lower than that paid by my landlord for me to paint the fence (lol). But at least, this job is still somewhat intellectual, related to what I am studying, and giving me some “professorship” experience. Also, I did learn some meta lessons from it.

I was a grader for two courses, Machine Learning (grad level, 15 work hours/week) and Operating System (undergrad level, 5 hours/week). The first one is the one I have not taken here and will take, but that’s fine because I’m confident with my ML knowledge. I was given a lot of autonomy in deciding the rubrics for the assignments, with the remarks of “keep things simple” and “don’t give everyone 100” (good rules!). I learned that being generous with grading will actually save me some time to resolve student’s complaints.

The OS course is the one I was also taking at the same time, but with a different professor. Therefore, I had to learning new things before every assignment I graded. Most of that was just reading from the textbook, which was not very well-written.

At the end, I got positive feedback from both professors. I concluded that being organized, being punctual, and communicating effectively are what make a good grader here.

Research

The point of me being in the US is to do research. Although PhD students can wait until the second year to start research, I was lucky to have found a good advisor before joining grad school. Therefore, I started doing research since day 1 of the semester. I was given a desk in a private lab and access to strong servers with plenty of GPUs available all the time. My advisor is very hands-on and my labmate is also hard-working and approachable.

Two months into the semester, I submitted my first manuscript to COLING. That was a lot of work, including data labelling, training models, writing, and of course a lot of planning and communication. Let’s see if such efforts can get me the first conference publication!

After that submission, we started right away into a follow-up project. We were fed with a novel idea from my advisor, and I am currently leading the team to executing that idea.

Looking ahead, I have my own curiosity that is not entirely aligned with the topics I am doing. The first topic is about formalizing the transformer, which I recently realized to be much more heavily studied by the community than I thought. My second topic is to combine planning algorithms with the inference power of transformer, similar to the Q* hype recently seen by OpenAI. The third topic is about a self-improving Turing Machine, which I may write a blog post about soon.

Life

Life in Dallas has been fine for me.

The goods:

  • I can still play as much sports as I can. I invested the most time into frisbee. I started to workout in the gym with a nice guy from my frisbee club. I also kept playing badminton with another PhD student.
  • I did a good job at being frugal (which my former roommate recently complimented me on). I have been spending less than what I earned.
  • I travelled to places within Texas with my frisbee team, and to Minnesota to visit a far-relative family. Now there’s a map of the US on the wall in my room.

The bads:

  • I went through a heartbreak a month ago that I still feel badly sad about today.
  • I had to use crutches to walk for 2 days due to an injury while playing frisbee. Now I am okay with walking, but I am not back to running yet.

That’s it!

Christmas light at Deerfield

I am thankful for all the people who have helped me to settle my life and work at UTD, including my wonderful parents, my sister Na, my (ex girl)friend, Dr. Vincent Ng, Jeongsik, anh Tan and his family, Mr. Antonie and his family, Con Ngon mafia, UTD Ultimate club, and many more. If you are reading until here, thank you for being my audience of this little blog. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!