Month: October 2021

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

Flashes of euphoria are another prevalent symptom of PGQS. The student oftentimes will daydream about their possible future life, be it as a graduate student, an employee in industry, or a life unrelated to their major. This daydreaming may lead to extreme excitement about the possibilities. A major risk factor for this symptom is applying to jobs or schools in different states or countries. This can oftentimes lead the student to ponder what life would be like in such a position and the excitement that comes along with that lifestyle. A job offer or letter of acceptance are highly likely to lead to this symptom.

I’ve received an offer!

All the doubt and the thick fog surrounding my future has cleared a pathway to success! The offer is for the California Bay area, so I’ll get to move back there and live with all my friends from my first undergraduate degree. Now I can relax in every other interview I have lined up, because I will know that there is no pressure. I’ll be alright, regardless of the result.

It’s kind of crazy that I got an offer from my preferred company, and nobody else. Somehow the stars have just aligned, and my path has essentially been divined for me. To be fair, this was the one opportunity that I really put my best foot forward in.

All the other interviews I had seem to have been stepping stones for me to get to where I needed to be. In each interview, I got a bit more comfortable with the rigor of technical interviews, up until the point that I was ready for this one. It’s funny because I was so upset after some of the rejections, but I should have had a bit more confidence that the pain and failure of one interview was guiding me towards success in another.

I feel so fortunate that my job search has gone the way that it has. I didn’t even mean for all of my other interviews to lead up to this one. I didn’t mean for this to be my the last interview–the one that I would be the best prepared for. Somehow it was, and another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. I guess I’ve got to be more like the Philadelphia 76ers star center, Joel Embiid, and ‘Trust the Process’. Though, I’m not too sure how well that’s going for the team with the whole Ben Simmons fiasco.

Here’s to the euphoria of finally making it.

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

After covering the topical breadth of their major coursework, the student may have honed in what topics do and do not excite them. This allows for their coursework to be exciting and meaningful in the development of their career. Filler classes seem to be fewer and farther between, as the student has progressed through major requirements and on to the elective and senior coursework.

Despite the hectic nature of the job search and the uncertainty that the future holds, this quarter is lining up to be pretty awesome. I had initially planned on transitioning my summer internship’s work on to my senior capstone project, but when I saw the opportunity to work on a reinforcement learning project, I couldn’t pass it up.

To give a little background on why this project is so exciting to me we have to go back to my senior year of my first undergraduate degree, in 2019. I had already decided to minor in computer science at that point, but I had not really decided what to focus on within the major. That’s when I saw this awesome video from OpenAI. OpenAI, Elon’s tech company devoted to the development of AGI (artificial general intelligence) for societal good, created a playground in which agents were to learn how to play hide and seek. These agents, hiders and seekers who’s roles I’m sure you can deduce, learned the strategies of the game without human interference or guidance. The hiders learned how to move blocks in order to create enclosures that the hiders couldn’t walk or see into. Subsequently, the seekers learned how to use ramps to invade the buildings that the hiders had created. The seekers even figured out a bug in the physical laws of the game eventually and exploited it to attain victory.

These agents were learning and, what appears to be, thinking. Back when I saw the video for the first time it was absolutely mind blowing to me, and to be honest, it still is. So when I saw the chance to create something similar, I had to jump on the chance. My group is making a clone of the old Atari game, Breakout. We plan to create an agent that can play the game and learn the tactics of the game. Eventually, we plan to pit the agent against a human to compete, but I’d also like to stretch the game a bit to see how different generations of our agent compare to each other. I want to see how the strategy of each agent evolves if we put two agents on the same board and with their own ball and see who can break the most bricks.

I’ve always planned to eventually create such a project with soccer, my childhood sport and hobby. I’d love to see how agents learn to play the game and what strategies develop over time. This project is propelling me in the right direction for creating my own simulation of the sport and eventually reaching my goal of working in multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Outside of my senior capstone project, I’m taking the cloud development class. This course is pretty awesome, as it has covered RESTful API’s, the bread and butter of backend software engineering. I’m getting great experience with reading documentation and incorporating pre-built software into my own applications. It’s something highly relevant and eye catching when placed on a resume.

Lastly, I’m still continuing work from my summer internship throughout the quarter! I’ll be assisting with the wildfire classification and detection models, and how to cleverly use mobile robots to assist with these tasks. Not every undergraduate has access to real world data, and gets to train machine learning models on it

I feel extremely blessed for these opportunities and I’m glad my time gets to be devoted to them rather than the facets of computer science that don’t interest me.

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

Another common symptom is a wavering moral ideology. As the student prepares for the natural progression from academia to industry, they become more aware of why others work for companies who’s driving principles do not align with their own. Be it due to a lack of other offers, greater compensation, less stressful work environments, or a multitude of other possibilities, the student may consider working for such company for what they tell themselves to be “at most” a few years.

A lot of decisions seemed a lot easier to make when I was younger. Black and white. Every question had an answer, and everything else was wrong. Simple. Choosing which company to apply to and allow myself to work at doesn’t seem to be quite as simple.

During my first undergraduate degree, I talked to a small company that was looking for interns in electrical or mechanical engineering. I happened to be, at the time, studying both. When I approached their booth at the career fair, not only were the engineers that I talked to very personable and welcoming, but the company itself had never lost an engineer. What a fantastic sign of how much I would enjoy my work. Our conversation at the career fair went so well that they actually extended an offer for me to join them as an intern, without even completing an interview.

The only catch was that the company was a weapons manufacturer. At the time, I had nothing else lined up for what I thought was the last summer of my undergraduate career. If I took this offer, I was sure I could get a return offer and a great stable job for myself. I would just have to get used to the idea that things I create were being used to threaten and harm other people. That’s not something that I took lightly. I ended up not taking the offer, not having a job lined up for the summer or after I graduated, and my career in mechanical engineering stalled. As I put the finishing touches on my computer science degree, I find myself in a similar position.

There are tons of companies out there who profit off of violence, laborer abuse, social irritation, or a number of undeniably unjust things. It would seem, upon a glance, that these companies would be easy to ignore. The only problem is that these companies hire tremendous amounts of engineers.

The thing is, if it’s not me, it’ll be somebody else. Somebody else make that weapon that’s used on fleeing enemies. Somebody else will create that robotic system that tracks and fight humans. Somebody else will write the algorithm that pits us against our neighbors. That’s why each time I come across a new posting at a new immoral company, I find myself asking the question–“how long could I work here and still respect myself?”.