Looking Behind and Looking Ahead: 2021 and 2022

05 Mar 2022

Here it is: the annual retrospection for 2021.

I started writing this on January 6, 2022. And this was sitting in my drafts for almost 2 months. Don’t ask why.

Looking behind at 2021

2021 was Year 2 into the pandemic and Year 0.5 to 1.5 of my Ph.D. Here are some highlights:

• I was a teaching assistant for 3 classes: STAT 311 (Intro Stats), STAT 435 (Undegrad Machine Learning), and STAT 512 (Grad Stats Inference). All of those classes were a blast to teach!
• I started working on two different projects with two different professors. Both of them are super exciting!
• I started taking singing lessons.
• I spent the summer working remotely for Microsoft in the Mixed Reality Object Understanding team. I developed an application to annotate object-poses.
• I moved into an apartment of my own.
• I attended my first Western wedding.
• I bought a PS4 and picked up gaming again.
• I signed an offer to return as a Data Scientist intern at Microsoft in the Xbox Product Services team.

Looking at the numbers

• Number of goals that I set out to achieve: 5

• Number of goals that I completed: 1

• Emails sent: 374
• Emails received: > 3795

• Papers read: 58 (+26 from 2020)

• Books read: 6 (-4 from 2020)
• Books in progress: 1
• Favorite fiction: The Eye of the World

• Favorite non-fiction: How to avoid a climate disaster

• Favorite music album: Equals
• Favorite song: Where You Are by Patrick Droney
• Favorite movies: No Time to Die, Spiderman: No Way Home

• Favorite TV show: Lucifer

• Video games finished: 3 (-1 from 2020)
• Video games in progress: 3

• Favorite video game: Uncharted: A Thief’s End

• Concerts attended: 0 (-2 from 2020)

• Theatrical performances attended: 0 (-5 from 2020)

• Miles run: 122.72
• Miles biked: 0
• Hikes: 7
• Favorite hike: Snow lake
• 14ers completed: 0

• Total 14ers completed: 1

• States visited: WA, CO, IL, IN, KY, TN (+4 new)
• Total states visited: 14
• Countries visited: 0
• Total countries visited: 3

Looking ahead at 2022

There are some exciting things happening in 2022 for me:

• Prelims in June. Once I pass this, I will become a Ph.D. candidate.
• Data science internship at Microsoft. I just learned that this will be in person.

Going forward, I intend to do more of less. In the past, I’ve generally been very distracted in terms of what I want to do. I had hoped that by doing more things, I would be able to figure out what I liked. Turns out I find a lot of things interesting and it is hard for me to say “No” when a new opportunity pops up. I end up having a lot of things on my plate and become stretched too thin.

To that end, I am going to impose a limit on how much I will do and stop testing the limits of how much I can do. The upper bound on the number of things I will be involved in at any point in time is 5. This 5 will be distributed between research projects, classes, teaching, and other obligations. Currently (March 2022) it is at 5. I anticipate it will stay at 5 until the end of this academic year. Ideally I would like to bring it down to 4.

Some other fun things I want to do this year:

• Work on more (side) projects
• Read more fantasy
• Play more music (or even try writing music)
• Play more video games
• Run a half marathon (I’ve been wanting to do this 2 years now)

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