New Year (Recap of 2020: Short post)

This year

• This year, although it was not filled without struggles, was pretty great for me. I got quite a lot done.
• I LOVED being home! I would have to say this past year was great (as I said in my last interview) for deep thinking. I also met a lot of people across disciplines, which was great. Looking back, I didn’t think I thought I’d be able to achieve as much as I did!

In no special order

• Presented research at 3 Academic (two first author, one second), peer-reviewed conference workshops (woo! I was aiming for 1 at the beginning of the year!)
• Invited to speak for 30 events (that’s about 1 every 2 weeks!)
• Reviewer for 6 Academic conferences and asked to be a reviewer and Member of the Board for an Academic journal
• Reviewed for 2 non-academic organizations, and wrote recommendation letters
• Organizer & Volunteer for a number of conferences (close to 7: this year I was involved in: AAAI, ACL, ICML, EMNLP, EC’20, ICLR, NeurIPS. I was also asked to speak on a panel for FaaCT but I couldn’t get my visa together in time to fly to Spain)
• Covered in quite a bit in press this year (to the point that my parents noticed!)
• Collaborated (through advisor) with industry while being on industry / advisor funding (Amzn)
• Worked on an NSF proposal with some mathematicians (Sage Maths)
• Proposed direction of my dissertation (and presented via MD4SG group)
• Completed a summer internship (Adsk)
• Secured for summer internship (Msft). I was fortunate to only do 2 interviews this year and to secure offers from both companies, but one got back to me faster :)
• Explored the world of entrepreneurship through the Harvard Franklin Fellowship (1 of 12 persons chosen) and wrote about my experiences.
• Wrote and reviewed a lot through Graduate Writing Center at my school, which improved my reviewing skills across disciplines.
• Was recruited for both a Creative and a Technical role simultaneously at the same company (wild!) and presented both an artwork and a scientific paper at a peer-reviewed Academic conference (NeurIPS)
• Did Code 2040 Fellowship, which I’ve always wanted to do!
• Participated and joined the SFPC community, which I’ve always wanted to do!
• Joined a reading and writing club (to continue to write consistently and with discipline)!
• Participant in 3 industry PhD events (Adobe, Msft Research, Bloomberg) and invited to another for 2021 (Jane Street), where I will be presenting my research!
• Mentored 2 persons; one is applying for grad school and presented their first, first-author paper at a conference, one got a job!
• Reviewed resumes and GSoC applications; 2 persons got in to GSoC (both on Privacy-preserving ML)!

Goals

• I made a list of goals; I already have some long-term ones, but I’m on this Slack where we’re doing it anyways, so why not?
• I’m pretty happy, and pretty grateful for everything. There are some things in the works I can’t talk about, but in the meantime, Happy New Year! :)

And that’s it