Georgia Tech Part 1: Start of Something New 🎵
My first semester at Georgia Tech is almost over. A lot has happened, but I still can't really believe it's gone this fast.
I like it here. Georgia Tech is really beautiful, especially in the fall. I like walking across Tech Green and seeing the trees shed their orange leaves and watching squirrels run across the grass.
People here are, in my experience, very kind. When people say "have a good one" or "thank you" or "bless you", it really does feel like they mean it. It doesn't feel (too) awkward to start conversations with strangers. America has made me more extroverted. College is the high school experience I never had. Welcome Week in particular was incredible---an entire week of no classes, where I hung out with new people every day, sat at new tables at lunch. I know that strangers are friendly and everyone would still like talking to new people; however, talking with new people is not the default anymore, and so I do it less often than I'd like to.
I really enjoy being around so many nerds. I like playing geography games with my friends (travle and worldle). I like that I've had so many conversations about rocket propulsion systems. People work very hard at Georgia Tech, but the environment still seems super collaborative. I've heard about other colleges being toxic, and I'm not sure to what extent that's true, but so far here, I've only been toxically competitive with one person (this is a joke). Sometimes at Georgia Tech, I feel stupid. It really is incredible what people do, straight out of high school. I feel behind. I'm taking easier courses than many of my friends, and I feel like I can't code for shit. These are all good things! I do feel like I made the right choice by taking CS over economics, even though I'm often playing catch-up.
My coursework has been good this semester. Linear Algebra and Object Oriented Programming is very interesting. However, a non-major course I've really liked is American Government. Partly because all the information is very valuable to learn, but also because I've found much of it inspiring. I didn't read any books these past three months, but I did tear up reading Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr. I'm excited for next semester, where I'll be taking a lot of the foundational CS courses: data structures, discrete math, and computer organization.
I joined three clubs this year. The AI Safety Initiative (AISI), Marine Robotics, and meditation.
AISI aims to reduce catastrophic risks that developing AI systems pose. With AISI, I did the technical safety fellowship and policy fellowship. These were targeted at getting a basic understanding of the key technical and policy challenges with ensuring AI models are robustly safe (e.g. won't help malicious actors) and aligned with human values. My views on AI are complicated and deserve a separate post, but in short, I'm very confused. Even though I finally feel like I understand the basics of how a transformer conceptually works, I still amn't able to build one myself or understand most ML papers. The nature of so many ML architectures being really new and not-well-understood means that even experts have wide disagreement on AI timelines. I'd hoped to go deep on AI research this semester, and I'm slightly disappointed I wasn't able to do as much as I'd hoped. My ambitious goal by the end of 2025 is to complete ARENA's syllabus. I feel like that would be a solid accomplishment from this semester.
Robotics has been both interesting and frustrating. Our training project was building a boat that could move autonomously. My goal with the club was to explore electrical and mechanical engineering. However, I don't really think I did that. Without intending to, I kind of just stuck to what I was most comfortable with---writing code. My mechanical and aerospace friends did the 3D printing, laser cutting, and CAD-ing, while I sat at my desk debugging software errors (well, I watched people debug software errors). In the end, we got our boats motors to run (yay?), but not the GPS nodes (curse you ioctl error!), and so we were unable to run the autonomy software. This isn't to say that I didn't love robotics though. I feel like just by osmosis, by watching my friend type in terminal commands or hearing conversations about Docker, I was able to learn so much. And I really love my teammates. Doing software for robotics, I've heard, requires a good understanding of the electrical and mechanical side too. And so I am very tempted to continue it, because I don't think robotics has gotten it's fair shot, but time is limited. I don't know what I'll do.
Nothing much to say about meditation club, except that I am very grateful to have had a regular meditation habit and the guidance of excellent teachers.
In my free time, I rock climb. In the beginning, I'd tried going to the gym consistently, but it just felt like so much of a chore compared to climbing (I still like gymming). Climbing has a very rapid rate of verifiable progress, especially in the beginning, making it really addictive. There's something primitively satisfying about it, the way chickens get joy from pecking the soil. Climbers are also really social, and I've made many friends at the gym. I really am so grateful for this sport, thank you friend who introduced me to it, if you're reading this. (If anyone reading this wants to climb together, hit me up).
Towards the end of the semester, I had a call with a professor doing interpretability for AlphaFold. I subsequently spent a while attempting to understand AlphaFold3 through this excellent article. I felt sad about leaving biology in 11th grade, but we are sooo back. Protein folding is insanely cool, and I feel excited about dipping my toes in it again.
It is November 18th, 2025. Thanksgiving is nearing and after that, finals week.
And oh, something has changed; Never felt this way, I know it for real; This could be the-
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