Grad school, one quarter in, thoughts.

 This is a blog post, I wrote during Winter 2020-21. I had written it for my previous blog, which I am re-publishing here.

I started this blog on July 2020 putting out my intro post during the early days of the pandemic. I finally got myself to write my second one 5 months later, consistency is much in order. Those 5 months has really been hectic, life changing in a sense. I started my grad school at UC San Diego in biophysics from October. I did my coursework remotely as I was not able( still hasn't ) to arrange for my Visa to go to the US. I still had apprehensions about the idea of grad school, but I was able to clear some of my doubts by reaching out to some senior grad students at UCSD, that definitely helped me a lot. I noticed one thing in particular, they did not seem to have all the answers themselves. I don't know if it was because the questions I asked were particularly difficult or specific to my circumstances. All through our lives we have always had the privilege of asking someone who went through the path we were going through, I am slowly starting to realize that through my last 22 years, I have carved out bit by bit my own unique path, which no one expect me truly understand. This idea hit me profoundly when my rotation advisor ( Elena Koslover) said the same thing to me, she said "grad school is when you realize that the stuff you do truly doesn't have any precedent". Those words is going to stay pretty close to me for a very long time).

Maybe it would be nice to write down why I decided to go for grad school and why I didn't go for a well paying job at flipkart., this would definitely help me stay focused when times get tough in grad school and I question my own life decisions. I noticed something very peculiar about all great people in history, that they were all pioneers. They pioneered something revolutionary. An example that solidified my ideas on this, and one that I tell most people is B Ravindran, a CS prof in IITM who works on RL. He did his PhD back in 1995 on this esoteric topic known as Reinforcement learning, which was a fringe sub field in Machine learning which was just a theoretical endeavor without any real life applications since the computational requirements were too huge. Then comes in 2012 a technology to run ML code in the gpu with massive parallelization capabilities and data backed from the internet age, which led to a huge boost in RL. This propelled B Ravi to peaks of stardom. He rode the wave of AI. Similar things happened to steve jobs, who rode the wave of transistors and Bill gates, who rode the wave of software. I strongly believe the next wave of innovations is gonna be in biology and biotech. I am pretty confident in this idea given my background in biophysics and the repulsive state of biology and medicine now. Medicine now is mostly about trial and error knowledge, we don't have a complete understanding of how biology works. We know that it can be explained by maths, physics and chemistry but the complexity of the problem evades us. One peculiar thing is that we can build an aeroplane and tell what would happen if we remove one resistor from any place but not when one gene is knocked out in a worm. Rapid progress is made in this direction but immense potential lies ahead. This was my key motivation to go into grad school in biophysics. I wanna catch the wave.

Another thing that is particular about biotech and biophysics is that the barriers of entry are huge since you need at-least a graduate degree to do anything worthwhile in the field, which leads to competitive advantage in jobs in this industry. A culmination of all these ideas helped me solidify my desire to go to grad school.

My first quarter was pretty interesting and HECTIC!. I think I bit too much than I could chew. I took four courses, Mathematical Physics, Mechanics 1, information theory and critical reading in qBio coupled with a rotation with Elena Koslover and TA duty in the Physics Tutorial center and grading for Undergrad quantum mechanics. All this with remote learning and timezone issues were a bit more than I could handle. Truth be told I thoroughly enjoyed it! The quality of instruction and the intellectual stimulus was amazing!

Grad school is very different from what I had in my undergrad at IIT M. The courses are very much Homework heavy, which forces you to truly understand the concepts and spend a lot of time with the content. Looking back, I think I barely studied in undergrad, IIT life was just 4 years of chatting up and tea! Which I do not regret :)

My plan for the winter quarter is to take less courses ( 2 core courses in QM2 and E&M 1) and to seriously pursue my rotation with Mattia Serra ( Who is a brilliant faculty who just joined this year!). Hope everything goes well :)