November - December - January Newsletter
Its been a long time, sorry. But a lot has been done
Welcome,
It has been a while. In fact, it has been a little over 3 months. A lot has happened in that time, so let's get into what I have been doing over the last 3 months without wasting any more time.
November
I just looked back at my calendar to see what I have done in that time, and wow have I come a long way. The first person who I met for an external meeting was on the 6th of November! In that time I have had over 35 meetings with industry professionals in just 90 days. That’s a meeting every 3 days with very legit people.
This success didn’t come easy. During this time my cold messages were very generic and bland as a result of this lack of luster quality I got a meeting at a rate of 3-4%. This was very time-consuming and difficult to keep up with while balancing a bunch of different things at the same time.
However, with practice, I have gotten better, in fact ALOT better. Now my hit rate is around 10% and I spend a lot less time finding people to talk to since I have some tricks up my sleeves, an article coming on this soon.
This also was the month when I definitely had one of the hardest weeks of my life. This was because of a little injury I had.
What started out as maybe a sprained muscle in my pinky lead to a whole fiasco that led to me missing out on a lot of opportunities
The way I broke my finger (skip if you don’t want to hear the story)
I was playing football in P.E and when one of the kids threw me the ball my pinky got all of the force. Now I didn’t think that this was much since I have stubbed my fingers a lot while playing football. So I carried on until the period was over. This is when I noticed that my finger was all slanted and won’t go back into place, nor could I move it.
So after class, I went to the nurse who said that this looked bad and called my mom. In the meantime, I went to class since my mom’s shift would take some time until it finished up.
Once she got to the school we went to the pediatrics and they told us to go to the radiologist and then the orthopedic surgeon. Note: I was kind of surprised by how quickly this all moved. After this, the orthopedic broke the news that I would need to go into surgery the next day or two. This was very not optional because that same weekend I had a TKS Hackathon and a MUN conference, PMUNC.
The Aftermath / Takeaways
Now, this was the start of a hard journey. After the surgery, I had only had 1 hand. This meant I had to spend 2x more time on my assignments than usual and I would occasionally experience immense pain because of my pain killers wearing off. This was all very annoying and combined with all of this I had to my deadline to public my mRNA sequence was nearing with my grades taking a toll because of the lack of productivity I had experienced. This was all on top of my AI project which I wanted to have done by the end of November.
This led to me having a lot of stress and anxiety, the latter I hadn’t experienced before. This went on until I had a talk with my director, who told me that
Life isn’t a sprint its a marthon
This might seem simple but it really hit me. I was treating this as if my whole life depended on it when in fact it didn’t. I am only in 9th grade and I had to bring myself down to earth that, ya I can accomplish great things in this time, however, my health is WAYYY more important than some project or grade.
December
Now taking all of these lessons into account I started to work at a more steady pace. Instead of procrastinating and making impossible deadlines, I would instead take it all one step at a time.
So using that I continued working on my AI project. This project would be able to use machine learning to detect hate speech in 7 different languages. I would be using the BERT model for this project.
I am also developing a front end for this project such that people can interact with it.
But overall this month was the month where I honed things down a lot. I was able to start perfecting the workflow of outreach. This workflow contains finding people to have the right opening message to how to interact with them.
This month was also where I made a lot of advancement in my time management by using time-blocking more often and other methods that I found useful to me.
Toward the end of the month, I had finished the backend of the project and I was looking to move on to something else. However, this time figuring out a project was a lot more tedious objective.
With my last project, I felt I had done something that was special since I did it by adapting others’ work for other problems into my own project. So this time I wanted to one-up myself. This led to first work on a flood detection system however, I found that this was an area where the projects were either incredibly easy or incredibly hard so I moved on from it in about a week or two. Another thing about me is that I don’t like to drop things, this can have some advantages and some major disadvantages. I can get myself to have anti-frugality but when something is just out of my reach it is hard for me to an aspect that it is. I learned this lesson the hard way by “wasting” my entire winter break on this.
The reason why I put wasting in quotes was that this was time that I would have originally spent on the project however, if I was more diligent I could have saved that time.
January
Honestly, this was a chill month, kind of.
I first switched my project to using the global fishing watch data set to help stop illegal fishing by using a machine learning model to determine whether a boat is fishing or not. By using this model authorities could be able to enforce their coastal waters and see if unregistered boats are using their economic zones illegally.
However, I found this project with very few resources and I wasn’t about to waste a lot of time on this. Additionally, the whole goal for this project was to learn about different methods of time-series analysis and I felt that I wasn’t achieving that goal.
As a result, I switched my project to imagine upscaling. You know how in those crime movies and tv shows the person would tell the IT guy to enhance the image. This would make the picture go from a blurry mess to a clear and crisp picture. So I wanted to do exactly this with an ESRGAN model.
So I have been working on this for the last couple of days and everything has been doing well. Hopefully, 2022 doesn’t have any broken bones for me!