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First Semester at CMU

2025-04-29
Tags:
  • school
  • musings

  • Been a while since I posted anything, but I've finally gotten through my first semester at CMU. Man it was a lot of work. Pretty rewarding, and I learned quite a lot.

    Over the course of the past semester, I've done a few things that I feel are pretty good characterizations of my time here so far.

    Classes

    1. Took Dr. Akshitha Sriraman's class on Data Center Computing (18-747)

      • Highly recommend this class to anyone interested in data centers and large-scale computing in general. Read a lot of papers, learned quite a bit, and expanded my technical horizons. When I have some time, I might write a post about some of the more interesting papers I read in this class.

    2. Took Dr. Raj Rajkumar's Autonomous Vehicles class (18-744)

      • This was a really fun class. We learned about the different components / systems in the traditional architecture of an autonomous vehicle, and how they all fit together. There was a little less emphasis on the modern architectures (end to end neural control) than I was hoping, but still very informative and interesting to start getting into the field. Our project here was to do a comparative study / evaluation of various ML models for operational domain detection and classification. We ended up using a few different models, including a CNN and a transformer model. More than the ML component, it was an opportunity to strengthen my orchestration / devops skills, as we had to acquire remote compute, set that up, get a Tensorboard environment working etc. Wasn't too challenging, but it was a good experience overall.

    3. Took Dr. Gregory Kesden's Foundations of Computer Systems class (18-613)

      • This class was a decent overview / review of everything from undergrad, and it's probably a good class to take if you want to refresh / practice your systems skills. Some of the CS classes have it as an absolute prerequisite, so if you want to take those, you have to take this. If that's not your interest though, you can probably skip it.

    Projects? Fun?

    1. Beyond just the regular classes, I participated in this year's TartanHacks - CMU's biggest hackathon. It was a lot of fun, and my team actually ended up winning first place in the Crypto category (jury's still out on whether we should have 😭). We even later took it to UC Berkeley's XRPL Hackathon and had a lot of fun. Big shout out to the team on that one - was genuinely a great experience.

    2. Pittsburgh has such a good restaurant scene. I was not expecting this at all when I moved up here, and yes things do close by like 10pm, but the food is so good, I might have to start a restaurants guide.

      • Some of my favorites so far:
        • Pastoli's Pizza - Great deals on the sicilian slices, and the crust is so good. They also have a bunch of community events and stuff, so it's a good place to meet people.
        • Honeygrow - American, great salads and sandwiches. Pretty healthy while still being delicious (and fitting a grad student budget)
        • Chengdu Gourmet - Actual genuine Chinese food and it's super close to where I live. Great late night meal.
        • Kiin Lao & Thai - This is a must have. The garlic noodles are just too insanely good to miss.