May is ending. My second semester in grad school is over. Similar to the previous term, I’m trying to be mindful, looking back at the last few months, feeling the joy of knowing that a wild time is over, and sharing that with you.

As usual, I first review my work, including (1) coursework, (2) research, and (3) other stuff. Then I review my “life” and express excitement for the summer.

Walking in Manhattan

coursework

This semester, I took only two “organized” courses to give space for research. One was good, and one was mid.

CS6363 Design and Analysis of Algorithms was good, or even awesome. I took it with Prof. Bereg (whose name I spelled wrong on Teams), an avid computer scientist who obtained his PhD from Minsk Institute of Mathematics (Belarus). Since the first few lectures, I knew I would like to learn from this prof. He talks CS in the language of math, making things really rigorous. Whenever he says “This is a really cool idea, guys”, I know he is going to point out a very interesting thing from mundane algorithmic topics.

CS6360 Database Design, however, was a mediocre class. I relearned entity-relationship diagrams, database normalization, hashing, etc. which have been covered in previous classes. Maybe the most novel thing was Relational Algebra, which was not that exciting. I was expecting labs that use real DBMSs. On the other hand, the nicest thing about the course is probably the group project, where I implemented a table classifier using SentenceBERT and CNN. In the project, I realized the reproducibility of Microsoft projects is annoyingly questionable.

research

Me and my partner in crime PJS during a late-night work session before a conference deadline

If in the fall, I had my first all-nighter conference experience, this semester saw me doing that THREE times. They were for February ARR (2 papers), April ARR, and SIGDIAL. In the interset of accounting, I have made 5 manuscript submissions so far, and probably I will have at least one of them published. Stay tuned for my first PhD publication! Doing these all-nighters got me more familiar with the demands of the field right now, the rhythm of my lab’s research, the standard of my advisor, as well as my own strengths and weaknesses.

I spent lots of time writing and got taught so much. I have known that I am not very good at writing. Now I also know that it is because I cannot tell when my writing is bad. My current guess is that to be able to self-assess one’s writing, they have to read the text from the target audience’s perspective. But at 3am at night, 3 hours before the submission deadline, in a deadly quiet lab, it is kinda hard to think from anyone’s perspective.

By the way, my work is getting more technical, which is exciting. My dissertation topic is about to be formed. Especially, it is quite unexpected how my seemingly irrelevant knowledge during Fulbright is now helping me get ahead in research, potentially becoming my main focus in the next four years.

professional thingy

Proctoring an exam

First, I was a grader for an AI class. I felt there was a lot more work — config autograder, answering questions about autograder, grading midterms, grading some of the assignments, and proctoring exams.

I also went to New York for a datathon, from which I developed a growing interest in quantitative trading as a discipline. That was also a precious time when I first saw New York (where a novel I am reading happens), which has a lot of fun things to do like Saigon, but richer and more walkable.

When the summer got closer and I knew I would be back in Vietnam and I felt that I didn’t have enough US dollars to afford my plan there, I did job search again. There I learned that cold calls and referrals are so much more worthy to invest in than mass applications.

Finally, in a few days, I will be giving a technical talk at a technical conference for the first time!

life

Campfire at Possum Kingdom

In terms of exercise, I had a super bad ultimate season. I had to skip most of the practices due to my earlier injury that haven’t healed. I even missed the Sectionals and Regionals with my team. For consolation, I managed to play goaltimate with my friends.

I also made good progress in physical health thanks to going to the gym with Zach C. I know I upset him quite a bit by coming late or leaving early (due to conference deadlines!)

During this term, there were three prominent events on campus. First, an eclipse happened right on UT Dallas campus, which was pretty fun. Second, I saw Matt Walker, a famous sleep scientist, in person! Finally, there were pro-Palestian protests on campus where some involved students, staff, and professors got arrested.

Emotionally, I had quite a few sad times, with fun times in between. I resent the unwalkability of the city of Dallas, but I loved seeing snow here. I had my first Lunar New Year away from home, but I am surrounded by lovely friends such as my labmates (JS and SJ), or Noel and Cathy (my iFriend friends) who I went camping with.

what’s next?

Hello Vietnam! See you in June.

My bucket list:

  • a lot of time chilling with my parents and sister
  • a lot of ultimate with Fulbright Ultimate Club
  • a lot of time hanging out with my favorite people in Saigon (you know who you are!)
  • working on an exciting Machine Learning project (and getting paid hehe)
  • attending ACL, the world’s biggest NLP conference, in August, with my advisor!
  • a lot of time thinking about the next steps for my dissertation + talking with the undergrad prof who inspired me about this current topic

Wow, you’ve read the whole thing. Thank you for sticking with the blog – I know I have not been writing as much, but I guess that means I took time to think more before I write haha. Thank you to all the people who have made my Spring semester fun and fruitful – Dr. Vincent, Jeongsik, Shengjie, Noel, Cathy, Nhu, chi Dieu, Le Khoa, Yuchen, Zach, and more!

P/S: “You are always occupied” is a response from my friend in college when I apologized to her for not responding to her text promptly. That was a realization moment that, yeah, I should not apologized for being occupied, at least because I won’t change that.