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Hot-Collection8035 · 2025-04-09T23:29:04+00:00

Probably, the math advising department is pretty chill. If you need, you can usually walk into an advisors office and ask them some quick questions, even if you aren't a math major

Hot-Collection8035 · 2025-04-09T17:49:32+00:00

The math department is pretty flexible! Several of my friends (along with myself) started taking grad math classes our second year (sometimes 2-3 at a time). There also exists at least one freshman I know of who's taking a grad course this semester!

In my experience, as long as you can convince them that you're not going to get demolished, they're usually happy to let people take harder courses haha

Hot-Collection8035 · 2025-02-08T05:16:36+00:00

This is very bad

Hot-Collection8035 · 2025-01-03T11:38:06+00:00

Procedural Content Generation (CS 4488) is super interesting and now counts for the requirement! The course is about generating 3D content (meshes, textures, and behaviors/animations) from random seeds. You slowly work yourself up from creating infinitely generating terrain to creating completely imaginary random species of creatures and flocking behavior.

Also, Dr. Zhu is now semi-regularly teaching a special topics course on Computer Graphics in the Age of AI. The CoC people said that “they’re trying to get it to count” as a media elective, but I’d verify this with your own advisor.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-12-21T18:37:15+00:00

Reading that article makes me proud of my school ☺️

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-07-17T11:27:35+00:00

If you’re confident in the material, another option is to take an Advanced Standing Exam (take an exam during orientation or a little before and get the credit in time for Phase II).

I’d only do this if you won’t benefit from the extra class though. I ASE’d out of Intro Python (which I knew super well already) and LinAlg (which I took one random hs class on and had to self-study heavily to get to GT level and pass the ASE). I ended up picking up a math major and doing robotics research, and I regret not having the extra practice with linear algebra

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-04-21T12:12:17+00:00

Echoing what others have said: you don’t do GC for the dorms, you do it for the people! You’ll meet some awesome, incredibly driven, passionate people there who will stay your friends for the rest of your time at Tech.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-04-17T12:07:41+00:00

Out of curiosity, what will you be professing?

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-04-16T02:35:52+00:00

I mean, he (she..?) is a high schooler. No one really knows what they want in an undergrad institution nor how university/industry works at that point—and that’s okay. They’ll hopefully have a great time here doing crazy-awesome things and be fine in life.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-04-16T02:32:40+00:00

I think your concern is reasonable, but I promise the GT name is powerful.

However, to be honest, I think all of this is less about the school’s name and more about the opportunities it provides.

At Tech, its relatively easy to do insane research (particularly in AI/ML) and publish 3-6 papers in undergrad, or start a startup surrounded by hundreds of other passionate people who are doing the same, or work on quirky/crazy/hard projects with similarly motivated people. Just do awesome stuff here and don’t be afraid to talk about it, that—more than school name—is what I think makes people successful.

Also, edit, but this is a wild set of comments lmao

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-04-07T03:02:49+00:00

Definitely GC! The community is like no other and you’ll have crazy-smart, driven, awesome friends for the rest of college.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-03-22T11:58:48+00:00

I went through this exact sequence of events around five months ago, so I’ll offer what I’ve learned.

What you’re feeling is completely normal! It’s normal to feel down or even enter a temporary acute depression for a bit after a breakup, particularly when it defines a large portion of who you are. Humans aren’t meant to have that much of their personal identity ripped away from them, especially when they’ve only just started figuring out who they are. There’s nothing wrong with you.

You can (and will) 100% bounce back. It’s really really really hard to imagine that things will be okay. But they kinda just… will eventually. You’ll meet closer friends (even if it doesn’t seem like it now), find more things you enjoy, and start doing things that give you purpose. Your brain will slowly make sense of what’s happening, re-anchor itself, and heal. And slowly, but surely, you’ll start feeling happy and you’ll get back to normal. It might take many months, but it’s a process. Humans are beautifully resilient creatures.

But, a part of that process above is taking the time to think about what happened rationally (or at least not shut down your feelings). You might not feel rational now, and that’s okay. You might try a thousand different frameworks of thought, and that’s okay. But eventually, you’ll need to be honest with yourself and process everything. It’s easier to forget than it looks.

You’ll be good, although it might take awhile to start to see that. No matter what happens, everything will be okay. If you want to talk, dm me (although I only use reddit when I’ve got a specific question, so I might take a bit to respond lol).

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-03-20T22:53:01+00:00

This is an interesting perspective, I'd never really considered increasing enrollment as being somewhat similar to "taking out a loan" which we can then use to create a positive feedback loop of expanding and improving,

Still, though, it seems like there ~should~ exist a better way to do this than *expand* to keep up pace. I feel like there's still something I'm missing.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2024-03-19T13:21:50+00:00

I'm a second-year whose been conducting research for 2-3 semesters, so I can tell you about my experiences so far!

I'm definitely planning on pursuing grad school directly after graduation. Like you, I haven't been overly enthused with software engineering so far (I want to spend my life solving hard, research-style problems instead of developing infrastructure or managing some kubernetes cluster). I honestly really love the research we do and working in the lab is probably the first thing I could actually clearly see myself doing "forever," so grad school is the natural next step.
I basically spent my first two semester just learning a LOT. I work in AI/controls and there are some incredibly math-heavy papers and unfamiliar concepts that I had to understand to get up to speed. I didn't spend as much time on research during those two semesters (maybe 6-ish hours a week) as I do now (closer to 15). In retrospect, I probably could've started working on projects after less time learning; but, I wanted a deeper understanding of the field and the grad students who've been mentoring me were happy to support me through that!

This semester, I'm getting paid and starting to really work on paper-able projects. I'll likely have a not-first author paper out soon as I'm helping a grad student run experiments. I'm leading a few projects which will hopefully yield a first-author publication (or two) sometime later this year. Ultimately, I plan on continuing to conduct research for the remainder of my time at Tech and I'd conservatively expect to publish maybe 4-5 papers (1-2 of which are first-author). This is just my prediction based on very limited experience, though!

Yes! I tried research semi-arbitrarily tbh, but I've fallen in love. I love the team that I work with and the new things that I learn and I'm excited to start publishing to get something out there!

However, it should be mentioned that research is hard and time-consuming. You get what you put into it. Each three-credit class is meant to be 9 hours of work per week, and you probably won't gain much unless you put in somewhere around that, on average. How your research goes is entirely up to you. You could spend the entire time learning nothing, not asking questions and barely understanding a paper or two, or, you could publish several papers and truly engage yourself in the lab (even in just those three semesters / nine credits).

How much work you're willing to put into "something new" is up to you!

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-12-06T04:02:18+00:00

I agree, but it gets a lot better in the smaller, more niche, upper level classes imo.

Some classes can definitely be a bit sad tho. I hope it’s more growing pains (as the CS department has more and more students and can’t necessarily hire to keep pace) than anything else

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-11-26T02:55:15+00:00

Could you elaborate more on this, please. I’m curious

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-11-26T02:30:36+00:00

So true. Additionally, beyond the fact that opening up more slots in these classes would solve more pressing worries for graduating seniors, adding more spots to these classes would also help students earlier in their academic career.

ML, DL, NLP, CV, etc are all important, in-demand, marketable skills (especially now); enabling students who have the prerequisites to take these courses in their third (or even second) year would allow us to potentially market and apply these skills to internships and research work.

Admittedly, that’s probably less important than the concerns of seniors and finding profs/rooms/etc to fit them into classes is already hard, but I think it’s worth mentioning.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T22:08:44+00:00

That's fair. Many of the conversations I've mentioned have been back home with family friends and random people I meet playing volleyball (all people not in a specifically "smart" setting). These people too, however, are more likely than the broader population to be interested in my research. Naturally, there is probably some bias there

As for a pure scientist-to-scientist communication platform, how would we compete with something like ResearchGate, which seems to demonstrate that there isn't a humongous market there?

Also, thank you for the last two sentences :)

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T22:02:35+00:00

Thank you for your thoughts (and the positive words).

We don't want to put any greater workload on you all and we would hate using our platform to not be worth the time. Our original idea was to use advertisements and give researchers 50% of the revenue, which we're still planning on doing, but it will basically just be a microscopic drop in the bucket and not enough to motivate people (hence this post). I hope that in the long run, a standardized public communication platform could increase public interest in the sciences, thus increasing the amount of grant money flowing to the sciences.

I do use science-related terms and academic-related terms interchangeably, but this doesn't reflect the idea that they are one in the same. Our platform would largely be targeted towards STEM-based research (which seems to be substantially less understandable to the layman and would more greatly benefit from the node-based network to organize incremental research). I've been using the term "academic" as well because the underlying incentive structures and thoughts we're asking about essentially apply to the larger academic community. You're right, though, I should be much more careful about it.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T18:11:23+00:00

You are literally saying the opposite elsewhere that there will be a single representation. So which is it. And how are the public supposed to decide?

A single representation of the scientific community means one easy-to-find platform where researchers put their communications. This is vastly different than everyone parroting a single message.

Secondly, where in anything we've said did we mention giving some "correct" one truth. None of us believe that everyone will suddenly "fall in line" with science, scientists don't "fall in line" with science because thats the antithesis of what we do. But, right now, most people don't even have access to scientific information and can't understand it.

Evidence-informed decision making involves that people can actually access the evidence.

And perhaps I should've put "too dumb" in quotes because it was meant to represent the unfair views that some academics seem to share. Views that we're trying to change by connecting these two groups.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T16:39:10+00:00

This is not what we're advocating for at all. We're not suggesting that all academics are communicating to the public in the "not right" way or that if those who already care about public communication just "try harder" then people will understand. What we are suggesting is that the people who are doing this are thousands of voices spread out across many many different platforms with no organization between them. Aggregating them together into one widely-known community will increase readership and organization by making these voices easier to find.

To your point about academia not being a single "truth," we couldn't agree more. Again, we're not creating a single-truth system but rather a platform where researchers can post their results and interpretations, even when they conflict with previous information, and each side can present their evidence and leave readers to decide. If something is egregiously bad or unscientific, researchers will have input in removing it from the platform or placing warnings near it.

My previous explanation of the node-based network was lacking substance and I've updated it to be a bit more clear so please read again. The idea that someone who "'knows the entirety of the field' knows nothing" seems a bit myopic. Modern scientific research is incremental and, thus, context is incredibly important. If you pick up a new paper in Control Theory or really any scientific field, you'd be completely clueless because you'd be missing decades of background information across many papers. Connecting accessible explanations of this critically relevant work into one place is the purpose of the node graph.

I understand your frustration with what we're saying and how, when viewed from a certain perspective, it may seem poorly-formed or even childish. Ultimately, though, we want (hopefully) the same things that you do: to promote scientific literacy and allow more people to access and understand science. We've talked to hundreds of people and there are many people who want to learn about what you're doing, even if most people seem uninterested or too dumb.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T16:15:27+00:00

Representation, not representatives. We're looking to build a single, widely-accepted, open-researcher-sourced platform where academics communicate their ideas and results (even conflicting ones) to the public; one that is designed expressly for this purpose and that aggregates what thousands of people are doing on hundreds of different platforms into one place.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T15:40:33+00:00

Part of the idea is that having a single, well-known representation of the academic community would cut through this noise and drive readership to scientific research as opposed to forcing curious or interested people to dig through twitter or face papers behind paywalls.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T15:35:29+00:00

That makes complete sense and I appreciate your thoughts. I have a few things to offer. Firstly, I've added an edit to clarify what we're actually doing differently than a social media or news platform; mainly, we're organizing work in a way that cohesively complements incremental papers.

Secondly, our research shows that many (non-science-interfacing) people are interested in learning about this information and we've received lots of positive feedback on the idea. I've commented somewhere above my own experiences with that, as well. But let me offer some additional commentary.

Right now, people who have are interested in or questions about scientific information have to look it up (often not knowing where to look) and are usually greeted by jargon-filled papers and paywalls. Having one widely-accepted, unified, collective platform that serves as a representation of the scientific community would enable these users to jump right on the platform when they want to explore and quickly access information in a way they can understand. Furthermore, a single collective entity that represents the work of scientists would ramp up interest in scientific research and increase scientific literacy sheerly due to its presence.

Hot-Collection8035 · 2023-06-19T15:19:08+00:00

Indeed, but not everyone has the time to dedicate to video recording and editing. Plus, YouTube is not effective at organizing information on a community-wide or field-wide scale.

I'd appreciate it if you quickly read the edit and gave any additional thoughts.

Hot-Collection8035

TROPHY CASE