UT Austin 碩士牛仔生活(二)

論文 X Spring break X 學校

Just finished the rebuttal, hope everything goes well.

Research

After the winter break, I spent almost all my time on the submission deadline in March. Our lab has a very careful paper-writing drill — all drafts have to be done 1 month before the deadline. It was many experiments and writing every day for 6 weeks before the deadline.

I thought having an internal deadline that early would make me less busy before the submission. But actually, it stayed very intense through the entire month. New tasks and experiments continued to come up, and we tried all means to make the paper better.

The most difficult part is how to write something that meets the PhD student KA’s and the professor KG’s standards. For almost all paragraphs, I wrote them and revised them several times, but still didn’t meet KA’s standard, so he rewrote those paragraphs. The craziest thing is that half of the time, KA also didn’t meet KG’s expectations, and KG wrote those paragraphs again herself. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference before and after the revision, but KG is very skillful at making the topic more interesting and impactful.

On the day of submission, I had Raising Cane’s and stayed up until 4 a.m. Research skills, writing, experiments, … there are a lot that can be improved. It’s nice that I can get this done in 7 months. Anyway, it’s spring break!

KG said her mom enjoying reading my paper haha.

Spring break

A few days after submission, Ariel came to Austin, and we spent the spring break together. We had some great food in Austin, like Terry Black’s BBQ and Sip Pho, but Raising Cane’s and Einstein Bro’s Bagels are her favorite. We had a chocolate chip bagel toasted with honey almond shmear every day for breakfast. Ariel also did an iconic DIY on my hair.

We also went to Houston for the NBA game, the zoo, and NASA. The Houston zoo is amazing with many kinds of animals we’ve first seen in our lives. NASA is a fun place to see tons of astronaut stuff, and the merch is incredible. Houston is probably the city I like the most in Texas now.

The last city we went to was Dallas. Her friends and us had Korean BBQ in a Korean town. We also went to Fort Worth for the Longhorns. The cowboys and the cows let us take a lot of pictures. Hope next time we can watch the rodeos.

School

This semester, I started participating in some of our lab’s events. Knowing them better makes me less nervous when I am presenting my work. We also had a group gathering at the end of the semester, where we had some very luxurious vegan dishes and a comedy show. The comedians act, sing, and tell jokes at the same time. It’s very interesting, but the type of jokes is very different from Taiwanese taste.

For class, I took Statistical Machine Learning from ECE. Same as the generative model class last semester, I found the theoretical content very hard to apply to my research. On the other hand, something that is less related (like graph theory) can be more inspiring. Another course I took was undergrad Machine Learning by the math department. I think it’s too easy as an upper-level course; it feels like a course for freshmen in HK. The last course I took was Vision Recognition by KG. It’s KG’s class, so of course, everything is connected to my research. (That’s why I didn’t skip a single class?) She requires us to write a paper review every week, and I think it’s a good habit to maintain.

We have a group of people playing basketball and having Raising Cane’s every Sunday. There are some new guys joining, but many members are graduating. Hope some more can join next semester.

That concludes my second semester. I am quite excited to start my new research. Still have no idea what KG thinks about me, but I told her I want to stay for the PhD. 讀碩士都那麼刺激的嗎?