Short reflection and highlights

Summarizing my thoughts and experiences in the course of the transformative first yr of my Master’s program in HealthTech, Fall 2022 — Spring 2023.

To see only highlights, scroll all the best way down.

Firstly, I actually have to say a very powerful part. Cornell Tech has allowed me to fulfill incredible individuals who became my close friends despite our limited time. All those that supported me throughout this yr by listening, playing games, watching shows, brainstorming together on some crazy ideas, exploring museums, attending events, praying together, and just being there — I appreciate you rather a lot; thanks for making this academic yr very special! Separate thanks to 11C, Grace, and Tayana 🙂

How much time are you able to spend studying? — a matter I must have taken more seriously. It is feasible to take super difficult technical classes (what I did in my 2nd semester), and the struggle to balance studies/sleep/health/fun becomes very real in a short time. Nevertheless, if a student desires to deal with developing their enterprise, networking in the town, volunteering, and/or leading a club, it is feasible to take easier classes that don’t end with the requirement of writing a scientifically novel paper as a final project 🙃. Fifteen credits per semester is an expected number to have, and it translates to five classes, 3 credits each. Though it could sound like rather a lot, having a comparatively easy semester is feasible. What I loved probably the most was the chance for Masters’ students to take Ph.D. classes which might be demanding but additionally became my favorite. A few of my classes I enjoyed for being creative and fun, corresponding to HCI. I liked the openness of the professors to debate and help their students. I wish I actually have taken more business classes, as there are a lot of of them provided on campus.

I had a possibility to work on a couple of research projects in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine — one in every of the largest hospitals in the town. These included heart volume estimation for transplantation purposes and automatic laryngoscopy (voice box) procedures diagnostics. That is, nonetheless, not the norm but an exception. The campus is small and young; the environment for research is kind of limited, so people occupied with science should search out such opportunities themselves. Cornell Tech is more focused on industry and entrepreneurship than research (from a Master’s student perspective).

A complete surprise for me was the interviewing process for summer employment. Apparently, the early start for interviewing within the US is in August should you’re in search of the subsequent summer internship or full-time job one yr ahead. August, btw, is when the semester only starts. I began applying in September after I heard from my peers that they’d already sent N resumes to N firms. It was a shock that students here apply so quickly without actually moving into the semester and determining what they desired to focus more on in the course of the yr. One other surprise is that the market is so stuffed with talent that sending tens-hundreds of resumes is taken into account normal. I started applying in the beginning of September and got the offer in December.

Leetcode is crucial for all engineering jobs. Doesn’t matter if it’s software engineering, ML engineering, or ML research. All of those positions will test candidates on their knowledge of algorithms. I can’t say I used to be surprised, nevertheless it still seems very unbalanced whenever you’re applying for research in machine learning, nevertheless it is required to know algorithms on the extent of a software engineer. While it’s possible to arrange for all of that, it is simply one stage, and all of the others afterward can be intense machine-learning questions. Nevertheless, some firms have different strategies for choosing candidates, they usually may ask for the presentation of the finished projects inside ML fairly than testing competitive programming abilities.

It was very nice to see many students interested to learn more about Ukraine and the war. I used to be asked a whole lot of questions on culture, history, politics, the most recent events from the front lines, etc. That’s also one in every of the explanation why I organized a tour of the Ukrainian Museum. Because the yr progressed, it became common to have lunch at Streecha in Ukrainian Village along with a couple of friends. Seeing and feeling support from the scholars and the college is heart-warming. I feel the importance of representing my country at times like this greater than ever. The further away you might be positioned, the tougher it’s to remain in contact with the updates, especially because the international media has decreased the war coverage over the months. I used to be glad to see that despite this, many individuals here still care and ask.

In comparison with Chicago, Recent York doesn’t have as many events for the Ukrainian community, so it’s harder to attach. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the events of Razom for Ukraine and attended a couple of weekly NYC rallies.

Student Government organized many events, including parties, sports tournaments, art-related sessions, a visit to Six Flags, etc. Jonathan Li did a tremendous job with this! It was delightful to ignore studies for somewhat and revel in fun activities. That’s also why I helped organize Game Nights events, where students played board games each weekend on the rooftop of the House (constructing name for student housing). Due to Tyler Bershad — who got here up with the good idea and allowed me to affix as a co-president of Game Nights Club. I had a lot fun! One regret — we haven’t done VR Game Nights even once, although we were talking about it often (aka something to repair in the subsequent yr).

Some events on campus were meant for networking; nonetheless, those were mostly small events, and the people attending were all not directly connected to Cornell (alumni, professors, students). To expand the network, students need to search out events in the town, and the best technique to do it is thru Eventbrite. I did this a couple of times and have mixed impressions, but when you should network with latest people outside of campus, that’s a superb option.

The campus is incredible! Roosevelt Island is secluded from the noises of Manhattan with beautiful views throughout at any time of the day. And to be honest, it’s cool to live to tell the tale the island 🤭.

NYC is so so expensive. Okay, perhaps I knew about this, but I used to be still surprised. Some things that I’m used to paying for in Europe repeatedly, I can’t afford within the US in any respect 🤷. The principal advantage of NYC is the access to so many events and opportunities in the town. You only have to pay for lots of them. That being said, there are definitely options on learn how to avoid paying the touristy prices for attractions. For instance, many Broadway shows have a lottery where you’ll be able to get a ticket for $30–40 per play. Many museums have free entrances for residents of NYC a couple of times a month. I shouldn’t have rushed to see all of them as soon as possible, but as an alternative have looked totally free tickets. Food in Manhattan is dear, and there isn’t any way around that. Nevertheless, Queens and Brooklyn have nearly as good options and a whole lot of authentic international cuisine.

Seeing a rat on the road? No have to run; it’s common. You are okay so long as the variety of rats near you is smaller than the number of individuals.

I wish I knew that it gets super hot in summer! Over 35 degrees Celsius (95 F). And the subway stations would not have air-con, so bringing cold water and using buses when possible is the very best option.

The coffee here could possibly be so significantly better. Furthermore, it costs like 6$! It’s still painful… However the coffee shops look very cute.

Now, listed here are a few of my most memorable semi-academic moments:

• Won Grand Prize at NYC Health hackathon 💻
• Became a co-president of the Game Nights club 👾
• Worked for all the yr at a research lab in collaboration with a hospital
• Met and had a conversation with Tim Cook 
• Interviewed with the Apple Health team
• Got a summer internship at Cleerly — an organization that automizes the diagnostics of heart diseases — literally what my startup didn’t do a couple of years back
• Won a grant to attend in-person CVPR this summer ✈️

• class by amazing Sasha Rush from 🤗 Hugging Face
• — was extremely difficult, but I learned rather a lot
• Took three Ph.D. classes: Interpretable ML, NLP, and 3D Computer Vision
• Many healthcare-related classes

• Worked part-time all the academic yr at a research lab on a heart segmentation project under Mert Sabuncu from Cornell Tech and Benjamin Lee from Weill Cornell Medicine
• Wrote a final paper for NLP class on exploring GPT capabilities in Visual Language Understanding tasks (to be continued)
• Worked for one semester on research with diagnostics of anomalies in voice recordings from laryngoscopy procedures in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine
• Did a final paper on the Compression of Large-scale Transformers
• Enjoyed a project on image captioning for medical applications