The Year in Review
05/10/21
At long last, the school year has come to an end. I won’t waste your time by ranting about how strenuously COVID tested me or how my life was flipped upside down for the majority of the year. In all actuality, you’ve probably read plenty of identical articles and takes. As such, I will merely give a simple overview of how this year progressed for yours truly.
Despite COVID throwing a wrench in my plans, I still managed to achieve the majority of academic and professional goals I set at the start of the year. My main concern coming into the 2020-2021 school year was securing an internship at a reputable Silicon Valley company for the summer of 2021. After 133 applications and dozens of interviews, I happily accepted an offer to become a SWE intern at Uber. I start in three weeks.
Additionally, I interned at The Home Depot as a part-time SWE intern this spring in their OrangeWorks Innovation Lab. Overall, the internship was a very positive experience. For a massive Fortune 500 company, The Home Depot was extremely accommodating and made me feel at home. All my co-workers were both talented and respectful of my ideas, regardless of their superiority in the chain of command to me. Over the course of the internship, I worked with ARKit and LiDAR – particularly with their applications to 3D model scanning. You can read more about the project in my report-out here.
Another area which was new for me this year was undergraduate research. At the start of the fall semester, I joined Dr. Thad Starner’s Contextual Computing Group at Georgia Tech. For those unaware, Thad was the technical lead of Google Glass and is one of the foremost HCI and wearable computing experts in the entire field. Our group is currently researching the applications of Hidden Markov Models with regard to American Sign Language recognition. Over the course of the year, our group published our first paper on the topic (of which I am proudly a co-author), presented our findings at Georgia Tech’s 15th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium (UROP) (at which my research partner and I won Best overall Poster Presentation), and submitted our work to the 2021 ACM CHI Conference which is currently ongoing. We also plan on submitting our paper to several journals once we receive feedback from CHI. I will link the paper here at a later point. While somewhat surprised, I am pleased I was able to win awards in this field after less than a full year of entering. Undergraduate research has been fascinating so far and I look forward to continuing my studies in the future.
Outside of academia and my professional career, I branched out into other new territory as well. My friends and I constructed and competed with a 2LB BattleBot via RoboJackets. I experienced Whitewater Kayaking for the first time on an ORGT trip. As normal, I cheered on the Yellowjackets at every sporting event I could, highlighted by our men’s basketball team winning the ACC and making the NCAA tournament. Exploring Atlanta and hiking nearby North Georgia trails was also a popular weekend expedition. However, COVID restricted many of the more social plans I had for the year – a fact I wish to rectify come fall by joining a variety of clubs in which I was unable to participate.
Overall, I believe I made the most of the year despite COVID. I have my priorities in order for the coming year and (God willing) hope to build upon my successes while learning from my failures. On a side note, I plan on writing in more detail about the activities I listed above at a later time. Until then!