500 Days of Summer

So I interned with the Office Lens team, at Microsoft - Hyderabad, this summer. I worked on some computer vision stuff (unfortunately, I can't go into the details here), and absolutely loved the experience. Ideally I'd have loved to visit the Microsoft Campus, but given the COVID situation, it was a remote internship. Nevertheless, twas' a roller-coaster ride, and I loved every minute of it.

The biggest takeaway from the internship was, however, non-technical. My project involved loads of experimentation before we finally got the results we were hoping for, and in the process I discovered the importance of having an organized workflow. I had never truly realized the essence of maintaining a diary of experiments, but these two months really drove home the benefits of maintaining a logical track of experiments, and a very clean roadmap. In a creative environment, a logical approach to attacking issues often takes a backseat as we frantically search the web for an off-the-shelf solution to our problems.

I've long since believed in having skin-in-the-game (hi, Taleb). I've always thought that being attached to what you do gives you aggressive conviction, and a sense of purpose to generate results. Over the course of this internship, however, I've experienced first-hand, that taking a step back, observing the success and failure cases in a logical mindframe and being detached from the results could be as effective (maybe even more so in the long run). And this, is the biggest takeaway from this summer-love of an internship as I warm up for the next exciting challenge ahead - my M.Sc. Math Master's thesis.

I'll be working on developing a GPU Parallelizable Automatic Differentiation pipeline, in Julia for a Meshless Solver. NVIDIA is gonna give us access to some amazing compute (some V-100s), and it's gonna be loads of fun. I can hear Tchaikovsky's words echoing in my ears, as I sit down to design a roadmap for what we hope to implement over the next 5 months - "Inspiration and work ethic — they ride right next to each other... Not every day you’re gonna wake up and the clouds are gonna part and rays from heaven are gonna come down and you’re gonna write a song from it. Sometimes, you just get in there and just force yourself to work, and maybe something good will come out."

And thus, I get ready for my Last Dance (bear with me, Jordan) at BITS Pilani - Hyderabad Campus.