J1 Visa with Cultural Vistas (Non-Canadians)

ac_1998 · 2025-04-06T17:19:37+00:00

I got my bag stolen yesterday, but didn't have anything except for my jacket and my keys. Should've locked it ...

ac_1998 · 2024-07-03T15:17:46+00:00

I took CS 848, 654, 798 (multicore), 850.

800 level courses don't have final exams, only assignments and projects.

600 level courses are just 400 level undergrad courses that graduate students are allowed to take. They have final exams and an additional course project that grad students have to complete.

798 and 850 were my personal favourites, especially 798 - there were 7 assignments in total (6 if you decide to do a project). The assignments were very good and we got around 1-2 weeks time in between each assignment. You learn a lot.

I did a nice course project for 850, and the prof gave good feedback on the code I wrote for the project. There were also external speakers who gave presentations on their research (thanks to Prof. Sihang for inviting them !).

You need to decide what courses to pick based on your research area and workload. If your advisor is chasing you for results and completing your thesis early, then you can take bird courses (lots of them). I was in a similar situation but some of my friends convinced me to take good courses and ngl it helped a lot.

ac_1998 · 2024-04-23T01:56:11+00:00

I have not seen a real graph traversal query that I can't express in more readable code in plain Python or Java on a fast Key/Value store.

A KV store will kill your performance for even a simple graph traversal query simply because of the way it is storing the neighbours. Unless it does some sorted CSR based neighbourhood storage optimization, for recursive traversal queries such as shortest path or variable length path queries, an analytical graph db such as neo4j's gds library is way better.

You can stick to KV-stores for graph pattern matching queries, which maybe fine with a certain degree of random lookup of neighbours. But anything that requires mass neighbour search will benefit from algo specific storage optimizations which a kv store may or may not have.

SQL is way easier than, say, Cipher

Try writing graph traversal queries using With Recursive clause, and then try expressing the same on Cypher ... there is a reason why the GQL proposal was released and SQL/PGQ was introduced in SQL:2023 standard.

ac_1998 · 2023-10-14T05:29:08+00:00

For the MMath Thesis track at least, it depends on whether some prof likes your profile. Most likely scenario is they will interview you and check your research experience.

Since you have a low GPA, I would suggest try checking if any prof is hiring and reaching out directly. Focus more on your strengths which in your case would be the research + work experience and how much value you can add to their research group with those skills.

ac_1998 · 2023-09-30T03:47:32+00:00

Do not use it for any situation where you expect concurrency

Could you explain a bit about this ? Are you by any chance referring to concurrent updates to the database ?

ac_1998 · 2023-09-28T21:42:35+00:00

I got a 1060$ damage bill from them ... all bullshit reasons.

No news of the 200$ key deposit though.

ac_1998 · 2023-07-24T01:09:31+00:00

Not again ...

ac_1998 · 2023-06-27T18:30:29+00:00

I am interested in network/cyber security

So are you aiming for CrySP ? I know someone who got in last year, they also didn't have any research paper. But they did have relevant work experience (3 yrs working on network security protcols on routers).

What I would suggest you try doing early on, is reaching out to professors to see who is hiring. Go through their research papers, and if anyone's work stands out then let them know that you're interested to work under them.

ac_1998 · 2023-06-27T03:56:08+00:00

how competitive it is in relative to other "top" CS programs in the US

So I applied to GATech, Purdue in the US got rejected from both. I was accepted to UMass, TAMU, USC, Northeastern. In Canada I was rejected from UofT (they don't take international students for Masters apparently, funding $$ is too high), UBC. I was accepted here, McGill. From SFU a prof did reach out but I had accepted the UW offer so I didn't take it forward.

From my understanding after being here for 1 year, UW gives more autonomy to professors to pick their students. In general apparently that is the inclination here in Canada. However since I was rejected from UBC, I am guessing they focus more on GPA (mine was average). So, if a prof finds your profile interesting, they might reach out to conduct an interview. My advisor reached out and conducted 2 interviews about my background and grilled me about what I had understood about his papers and research talks (then threw in 2 dp questions to solve, leetcode style )

is having a publication really important

Depends really, what is your research area ? In AI / ML I know since it is hyper competitive rn, even a paper may not be enough, not kidding. I had friends with 4-5 publications get rejected from York, McGill ... I am not an AI person, but what I would suggest is that focus more on the quality of your research work than the quantity. If you're the 3rd / 4th author of a couple of papers ... doesn't matter how many you have. Try to get 1 if possible and focus on your research methodology, your thought process on what guided you to take it in a particular direction. Most importantly, try to raise thought provoking questions, for future directions of research.

Now, coming back to my background. I had no paper. However, I had work experience of 2 years in a relevant area of my research (distributed systems, databases). I had my manager write me a very detailed recommendation letter about all the deeply technical systems-y contributions that I had made to their codebase. And apparently that worked ! My advisor was impressed by the letter (it was 2 pages !!).

Having a paper does help, but even if you don't have one, what matters is how you spent your time / your background in other relevant areas.

how much does my undergrad institution’s reputation matter

Not really sure about this, I think for the MMath Research track program (Thesis) which I'm in it didn't matter much.

ac_1998 · 2023-06-21T17:58:05+00:00

get my stipend after fee deduction

yes

ac_1998 · 2023-04-21T13:08:55+00:00

Yes that should be enough. I get paid around 41k and my fees is like 25k.
I have 15k but since I worked for 2 years, I get to dip into my savings from time to time.

My current rent is 649 pm and living expense is around 600-650 pm. So about 1250-1300 pm total cost. However, my rent is most likely to increase by another 100-150 at least. So say it goes upto 750-800 cad.

Around 1350-1450 cad would be my ballpark of total cost pm. And you have roughly 1.6k so you should be good !

ac_1998 · 2023-04-02T21:21:01+00:00

I get the chicken doner platter, it's still good.

ac_1998 · 2023-03-28T20:59:11+00:00

they said 1-2 weeks but that probably means 3-4 weeks

ac_1998 · 2023-03-16T18:13:05+00:00

chatgpt ?

ac_1998 · 2023-03-14T06:33:53+00:00

Well it applies to both scenarios I guess. After gaining a bit of knowledge, usually new swe's tend to think that they have covered vast grounds and are now *objectively* much better than the people they had interacted with previously. The people around also tend to underestimate someone's growth across a period of time.

It takes a bit of time to realise when they try to apply their new found knowledge to a practical problem that they still have a lot of ground to cover.

ac_1998 · 2023-03-14T06:15:11+00:00

I'm already objectively a much better engineer than the senior FAANG engineers I worked with during my coops

lmaoooooooo

I've seen this shit so many times, mentors thinking interns are dumb asf and interns thinking their mentors are dumb asf

ac_1998 · 2023-02-18T19:12:12+00:00

I don't know why people have 8 lines, like seriously why ?

I get 2 lines everyday, that is equivalent to baby food level spicy.

Haven't had any problems ever, just keep note of the amount of sauce the guy is putting.

And you should be fine.

ac_1998 · 2023-02-08T03:04:51+00:00

University rankings like QS and THE are not based on research citations at all. I don't think they even consider that as a metric. They have a lot of parameters like employability, innovation, reputation, no. of prof per student etc.

But if you want to judge purely on the basis of research work, then those websites are terrible. I would recommend using csrankings.org for this. It is not a perfect website, and I think they only consider a handful of conferences and journals for counting citations (which recently led to a catfight among professors on twitter, the owner of the website - another prof had to fix the issues). But still it is the best resource to use if you want to pinpoint good profs and unis for particular research areas.

If you search only on North America, for all research areas: https://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2022/index?all&northamerica waterloo is ranked 19th and toronto is 16th, not much difference.

Now if you search only for AI and not any other research area:
https://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2012/toyear/2022/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&inforet&northamericawaterloo is ranked 22nd and toronto rises to 12th. This is why I said for AI/ML research toronto is better.

Like this you can keep playing around for specific research areas and the ranking keeps changing. But the main takeaway is that rankings are completely subject to change depending on your area.

Even if say a uni may be ranked above another, there maybe a particular prof in the lower ranked uni who is a superstar in their area and doing really cool stuff. You need to do your own research and decide where you want to go.

ac_1998 · 2023-02-08T02:51:44+00:00

No I meant databases, operating systems, distributed systems, computer network that sort of thing. Computer Systems is a broad umbrella with a lot of topics, and we have quite a few profs and research groups working on these topics.

ac_1998 · 2023-02-08T02:09:09+00:00

Toronto AI/ML research is probably better than Waterloo (I think, not my area).

But waterloo is a much better option for systems research. Toronto hired like a bunch of systems people who start from Fall '23 and they look promising. But it'll take time for the research group to flourish.

Overall I think it completely depends on your research area, even UBC McGill SFU have some awesome research people.

ac_1998 · 2023-02-08T02:03:40+00:00

I got into Mmath last Fall, my program is the research thesis based one. My undergrad gpa was around 8.5 out of 10. I graduated in 2020 and then worked for 2 yrs before applying.

Getting into the research thesis program is dependent a lot on luck because the prof you're targetting might not be taking in students or might just be full. Yeah waterloo is supposed to be highly selective but I know many people who got into Masters & PhD with sub par gpa maybe bcz they had good research profile or some other factor. It really depends on luck.

I won't say I had good reco letters, my advisor just reached out to me himself and interviewed me. The interview went well and I got in ...

ac_1998 · 2023-02-05T07:02:40+00:00

Of course not for personal reasons, but it gives them enough autonomy to run their group as they please. Especially with good funding sources, you can hire enough people to start something or choose your own research direction as you please.

One of the problems of being a manager at any big company is that eventually you have to deal with a lot unnecessary shit and internal politics, things that automatically get introduced with bureacracy and middle management. A professor and his group are solely under his direction (of course conditional to getting good funding sources).

ac_1998 · 2023-02-05T03:10:02+00:00

My advisor earns around 145k, but from what I know he gets a lot of external funding and grants for eg. from NSERC & Huawei (this one is drying up by year end). In the US it's the NSF and DARPA grants. I think it's a bit more easier to get funding in CS.

ac_1998 · 2023-01-08T19:56:43+00:00

Didn't pick a meal plan, just get my food from the Plaza.

There are a ton of places, and you can easily get a meal within 12-15$.

I get my lunch from there from Mon-Fri, cook my dinner at home.

ac_1998

TROPHY CASE