Graduating University of Waterloo

I recently just finished my studies at the University of Waterloo. I wanted to reflect on my experience at university, and share some of the things I learned along the way.

Overall, I think my time at the University of Waterloo was amazing. I could never have gotten the opportunities I got at Waterloo anywhere else. The ability to work at six companies, be guided by some of the world's best professors on research, and pursuing a triple major, were all things unique at UWaterloo.

When I started off, I was majorly underconfident in my own abilities. Coming from India, I had no idea what to expect from a North American university. I had no idea how to apply for jobs, how to prepare for contests, how to do research, or even how to talk to professors. Everyone around me was very different and I didn't know how to fit in initially. Students at UWaterloo, to me, always seemed much further ahead of me in terms of experience and knowledge - people participated in so many contests, already had internships, participated in many hackathons, and had so many awesome projects.

However, I am a person who always gives my best, no matter the circumstances. I continued my hardwork from high school, where I always read textbooks, solved extra problems, and tried to learn as much as I could. I solved many textbooks, including Spivak's Calculus, Linear Algebra Done Right, Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis, Elements of Statistical Learning, Casella and Berger's Statistical Inference, and many more, most of which were not even course related.

I also pursued lots of research in undergraduate. My first research was in Graph Theory with Professor Sophie Spirkl. We got a new algorithm for recognizing (p,q)-split graphs which is on my website currently. I learnt how to think about math problems and also how to approach research at depth.

My next research was with Professor Olga Veksler which was also my second co-op term. This research was in Computer Vision where we worked on a new unsupervised learning method for boundary detection. We also worked on one-step instance segmentation algorithms, and devised a new metric for instance segmentation using stable matching. It was here that I learnt a lot about how to think and look for problems in machine learning and how to solve them. Thanks to professor Veksler, I developed tons of intuition about computer vision and reading research papers and the whole process!

I also pursued research with Professor Yuhao Chen at the VIP lab at UWaterloo. My first project was in video food volume estimation which was published at CVPR , and was very grateful that my work was recognized in the Wall Street Journal, New Scientist Magazine, and Sky News. I also then worked on a project on introducing hierarchical information in classification and generation, where I devised several new hierarchy-aware losses and metrics and got good results on some datasets. This was the first time I wrote a research paper, and went through the whole process end-to-end, teaching me a lot about the research process, and how to engineer solutions to challenging real-life problems.

I also pursued research in Analytic Combinatorics with Professor Stephen Melczer, where I worked on implementing an algorithm for computing asymptotics of bivariate rational generating functions. I also learnt a lot about the methods of analytic combinatorics, and Professor Melczer gave me lots of intuition about these methods and how to think about them deeply.

These experiences have been some of my best moments at university. I am really grateful to all my professors for giving me these opportunities. When I was deciding to come to university, the most important part of my search was research. I am extremely thankful to UWaterloo for making research so accessible to students.

I'm also really thankful to all the friends I made at university. I had a lot of fun, like going for sushi or bingsu with friends, or going to the park, or just meeting after classes. Even though I didn't participate too much in clubs, I still enjoyed many of the activities they organized, like Over 9000 and Integration Bee (both of which I won!). I also had a lot of fun at CUMC (Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference) where I got to meet many students from other universities and give a talk about problem solving in group theory and then about the math behind deep learning and transformers.

I ended up pursuing a triple major in Computer Science, Pure Mathematics, and Combinatiorics and Optimization. The reason I did this was because I didn't want to regret not exploring all my interests before graduating. And I did get to explore my interests! At the end, I scored 98.29% as my major average (with an average of 99.3125% in PMath courses from 1st year to 4th year and 99.7% in my CO courses) and a 97.56% Cumulative Average. I also had a near perfect run with analysis courses where I scored a 100 in every analysis course but one, and I took every analysis course in PMath (MATH 147, 148, 247, PMATH 351, 450, 451, 453). At the end of my degree, I have scored 100 in 20 courses (which is only almost half of all my courses in undergrad).

One of the main reasons I chose UWaterloo was because of the co-op program. I got to work at 6 different awesome companies. I met amazing and kind people at all of these companies, and I am grateful to all of them for giving me these opportunities. Something I never think about, because honestly I was not even trying to do this, but I actually got to travel the world. I worked in Kitchener, then Waterloo (I know same places lol), then India (my home), then London (UK not Ontario), then New York, and finally San Francisco. I got to have massive impact, whether it was building reports and data analysis for C-suite at Skywatch, or doing cutting edge research with Professor Veksler, or building in-production algorithms at WealthyPlanet, or implementing new algorithms into LightGBM and improving performance as a researcher at Jane Street, or having my machine learning model and pipeline literally classify every english text post on the planet for advertiser brand safety at X, or implementing cutting edge and state-of-the-art models at Baseten, I got a chance to amazing things.

Overall, I couldn't be happier with university. I went through with it, expecting only to do my best in everything. I just wanted to learn as much as I could, and I think I did that. I sometimes mull over the things I didn't do, but rarely used to ever look at the things I did. But university taught me to just look back and smile at this wonderful time that I spent at university.

Thank you so much for everything!