Sem2 Update
Semester 2 Update - Stony Brook University Spring 20 MS CS!
Semester 1 ended on a good note. Apart from the disappointing grade in the Algorithms course, everything seemed great. It was exhausting but I thought things would change for the better in Spring. This semester started amazingly! I was in some really exciting courses and the workload was under check. Things were exactly how I was hoping for. But then, come March and sh*t just hit the ceiling fan. COVID-19 happened and classes went online and everyone was under lockdown. Thankfully, after a few weeks of uncertainty, things started to go back to normal.
On the internship front, I still hadn’t made progress through January, February, and March. After close to 500 applications, the summer of 2020 plans was still in limbo. The struggle was real and I had almost given up after hearing internships being put on hold or canceled by many companies. My LinkedIn feed was overflowing with people losing jobs, internships, and having to deal with all that during a pandemic! I was fortunate enough to get a few calls during April and managed to get an internship offer from PlayStation during the last week of April. I’ll probably share my interview experience in another post. But don’t hold me to it.
Back to academics. Courses I took this semester were Probability & Statistics, Big Data Analytics, and Theory of Database Systems. Apart from these, I also worked on Advanced Project under the guidance of my advisor, Prof. Ritwik Banerjee. Below is a review of the things I have learned in each subject in brief for each course.
Probability & Statistics (CSE-544):
This course is amazing and Prof. Anshul Gandhi does an awesome job teaching this course. I wish this course was offered in the Fall when most graduate students join as this would have been an amazing course to refresh lots of concepts that I needed during other courses I have taken like, Data Science Fundamentals, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. The assignments were tough but they were group assignments, with group sizes of 5, to ease the burden. The exams were also good, but I wish I did better on the second exam though to bump my grade from A- to A but that didn’t happen. There is also a project, again a group of 5 people. I wish the group project started earlier in the semester to get more meaning out of it. Success in this course is guaranteed if you follow what Professor says to the dot. He is clear, always keeps you informed so you have everything necessary to excel in this course.
Theory of Database Systems (CSE-532):
To be frank, I took this course only to fill a bucket requirement that is required towards my graduation. Having learned about databases quite a few times during my undergrad, I did not want to take yet another database course. It is not like a despise the topic, I am not fond of it to pursue it academically. The assignments are fun, and Prof. Fusheng Wang goes into quite a few different topics, right from basic SQL, Stored Procedures to Parallel Databases, Apache Spark, Map Reduce, and XML databases and related query languages. Unfortunately, given the wide variety of diverse topics covered, there is not much time to go into the depths of any topic extensively. The assignments were fun, easy, and manageable. Make sure you get all the extra credits during the assignments to offset any pressure on the final exam.
Big Data Analytics (CSE-545):
This is again a good course and is taught by an extremely knowledgeable teacher, Prof. Andrew Schwartz. Only 3 assignments and a class project seem a good blend. We covered a lot of concepts here, Noferroni’s Principles, Similarity Search, Map Reduce, Hadoop, Apache Spark, TensorFlow, Recommendations Systems, and even some advanced stuff like Recurrent Neural Networks and Transformers. I wish time on the advanced topics should be left to Vision and NLP courses and we could have covered other Big Data-ish topics like Clustering maybe. The recommended book, Mining of Massive Datasets is an absolute gem and highly recommended. Similar to CSE-544, I wish the project was released earlier which allowed more time for us to work on it.
Apart from all of this, I also took a Seminar on Natural Language Processing where a few students and Prof. Niranjan Balasubramaniam and Prof. Andrew Schwartz discussed some amazing research papers and topics in NLP like Explainability and Attention and Controllable Language Generation. We met once every week to go over some pretty amazing research done in the field of NLP! Talking about NLP, I have also been working on some cool NLP stuff under Prof. Ritwik Banerjee as part of my Advanced Project. Most of my work has been under the guidance of a Ph.D. student around Textual Entailment and Information Retrieval.
Like the previous semester, I was also a Teaching Assistant for an undergraduate course. This time it was Software Engineering under Prof. Rob Kelly. A really fun course and I wish I had something similar during my undergrad. The course is well organized and is hands-on giving students an amazing opportunity to get the most out of it.
One more roller-coaster semester comes to an end, it has been tough but worth it!
If you want to know more about the life of a grad student in CS at SBU or just want to chat and know more about me or have opportunities for me - hit me up on LinkedIn or any one of the social network options on the left here (or on top if you are on mobile).
Peace!