How I Got Here

I am currently a master's research student at Mila and Université de Montréal, working with Prof. Sarath Chandar and Prof. Ross Goroshin on memory and adaptation in language models. Before that, I completed an H.B.Sc. in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Toronto.

I do research full-time now, but it wasn't always this way. When I started university, and for most of my undergrad degree, I actually thought I was going to be a software or data engineer. I did two data-science/engineering internships in the industry, and for my penultimate summer, I was originally interviewing for SWE internships.

However, I think I was always searching for something else. I had a strong interest in algorithm design and theory because I had some great professors (Faith Ellen, Danny Heap, Nathan Wiebe) at the University of Toronto who taught some rigorous classes in the area. I also took a statistics class with Jeffrey Rosenthal, and he let me work with him a year later on a Markov chain Monte Carlo research project. I was also very fortunate to work under brilliant machine learning researchers in my last year of undergrad: with Volkan Cevher at EPFL over the summer, and then Rahul Krishnan and Roger Grosse at the University of Toronto.

I decided on pursuing research full-time eventually because I found the intellectual challenge of the work to be extremely satisfying, and the people are just brilliant. It is a unique opportunity to work on problems at the frontier of human knowledge with people who are extremely smart and also much more experienced than you. It humbles you quickly. But I think research has truly embedded in me the growth mindset: that you can learn any particular topic or skill if you are diligently and consistently working at it, and can be patient with yourself in the process. It's something that I am truly grateful to have learned, and I think it has been a very positive influence on my life in general.

I think I was certainly a late bloomer, and maybe it just goes to show that it's never too late to start doing good research if it interests you! I am very happy to have found a great fit for my research at Mila.