Who am I? A (slightly more detailed) biography

I'm a computer science MSc. student at the University of British Columbia in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia—the city I was fortunate to have been raised in—where I am supervised by Prof. Danica Sutherland. The focus of my master's program has been on theoretical machine learning. I have always enjoyed mathematics, and machine learning is an incredibly mathy field that just so happens to be one of the most disruptive and innovative areas in science. I thought it was a no-brainer for me to pursue an academic career in this subject.

During my undergraduate degree, which I completed in May 2021 (also from UBC), I had the opportunity to establish close relationships with various professors via research assistantships and teaching assistantships, which ultimately facilitated my decision to pursue the MSc. program at UBC Computer Science. I had the ambitions most graduate students naturally possess: I wanted to eventually complete a PhD (ideally at a top university) and become a professional researcher.

I've ultimately come to the realization that I'm more keen about applied work and programming than I am about theoretical research. Thus, despite an exemplary academic performance in the first year of my master's program (an A+ in every graduate course I took), I've decided to pursue industry work immediately after my master's degree.

I'm open to software engineering, data science or MLE opportunities in 2023.

Why a website?

Personal websites are funny things. Some students use them to showcase their projects. Yet, from my perspective, GitHub is undoubtedly the preferable tool for this. Others use them to facilitate their job search. But doesn't LinkedIn accomplish this much better, with a profile that has much of what a personal website would contain, plus an infinitude of networking opportunities? Lastly, others use them to showcase their frontend development skills. I suppose that is one legitimate use, but is a personal website really such convincing evidence of web development aptitude when there are a million tutorials on how to create one on YouTube?

I have a personal website because it's a wonderful tool for self-expression. It's something I can incrementally work on over an extended period, with an essentially limitless potential for flexibility and customizability. For now, I've consciously made this website relatively barebones, written in simple HTML and CSS, because personally I find using modern frameworks for something as simple as a personal website quite overkill. I might change my mind in the future.

Ultimately, this is a work in progress. One thing I'm hoping to include one day is a blog, but I'm not inclined to do so at this time since I doubt I'd have time to write blogposts!