The quarterly review — Q6

Last Saturday, I graduated with a Master’s degree in Computer Science; I completed my thesis in the field of recommender systems titled, ”Exploiting temporal and geographical influences for personalized POI recommendation.” This was the last quarter of my master’s timeline and like every one of its likes before, this one too flew off in a blink of an eye.

I spent most of the quarter feeling an acute time crunch. At times, I would pull multiple nights with just 1 hour of sleep or no sleep. With the San Diego flu appearing in multiple cycles, I fell ill and a took a 1.5-week break in the middle of the quarter. If you aren’t laughing or shaking your head in great shock, you should be! Losing a week in a quarter is disastrous — so disastrous that you double down and sleep less.

The one big thing I underestimated is writing the thesis. This one was a sucker! I shouldn’t have started with the background chapter. I procrastinated with great levity and misjudgment about the time and effort it takes to transfer the observations and results to the written form. I spent roughly four full weeks writing it, including the revisions. This should make me happy considering the optimized time. However, it was a needless pressure that almost made me question if I would complete my thesis this quarter.

I spent some time on researching the problem of automatic playlist continuation, as a part of the Spotify Challenge. Unfortunately, with my thesis train going at an extremely slow pace and the illness only meant that I stopped working on it completely in the last month.

I had a pleasant quarter as a teaching assistant for CSE 21 — Mathematical Systems and Analysis, a foundation discrete mathematics class for computer science under Prof. Miles Jones. It was also my first time in a large TA peer group and I enjoyed the overall experience. The last discussion section was emotional as it was also my last teaching stint in graduate school thus far.

When I look back, I simply can’t believe the speed at which my two years at UCSD flew by. I learnt massively, I struggled through, and with every fall, I learnt to pick myself up. It’s been a fantastic journey, and I will miss everyone. It will actually hit me when I leave San Diego in one month, but for now, I still feel like I am in school, albeit carefree, pressureless and without time crunches. I wish I did more ab crunches at least now; Wh’re art thy abs, hath asked the longeth await’d summ’r.