2 semesters in; still alive
I wrote about my motivations on going to back to school here.
Took 2 courses:
- Graduate introduction to operating systems
- Machine learning for trading
Just completed my second semester so far, here are my thoughts thus far.
Learning about how people solved problems is really useful
It may not be super useful to understand how shared memory is implemented, or how to implement a decision tree without using a third party package, especially in today's age of LLMs.
But I realised that stepping through how people solved problems of their time, given the tools that was available then, offers a very unique perspective into problem solving.
Having graded assignments really helps as a motivator
While the content is technically open, and anyone is able to also learn the content on their own, having some external pressure is a great motivator. Prior to this, there was always another thing that has higher priority. I'm glad I took the plunge.
Will be taking advanced operating systems this semester, looking forward to see how things go. This course is a lot more heavy on papers, which was what I did not have experience in previously. Reading papers is a muscle that you can actually train, and I'm glad I can see slight improvements in my experience.