Wrapped up Spring Quarter at UCSC! 🎓
Finished my last and final quarter at UCSC last week. It's hard to believe these four years are already behind me.
Academic
This quarter, I took a class on Natural Language Processing (CSE143) and a class on Foundations of Programming Languages (CSE114a), along with a lame Gen Ed on Walt Disney (THEA 80N)
CSE143 — Introduction to Natural Language Processing
About the class:
This class covered:
- Intro to NLP & various NLP Applications
- Text Classification
- Sequence Labeling
- Syntax & parsing
- Language Modeling
- Neural Networks
- Neural Language Models & Transformers
- Ethics
Course Textbook: Dan Jurafsky and James Martin, Speech and Language Processing (3nd ed.)
My thoughts on the class:
This was the 3rd class I took with Prof. Rudnick, so I came in with some background in NLP concepts. Much of the ML material was a repeat for me (I believe revising the material only helps me internalise it more deeply), but the rest was new and, as always, I really enjoyed the class!
For the final project, we trained our own GPT-style language model from scratch (and no, we totally didn't have Claude do it all for us 👀), following along with Sebastian Raschka's Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch). Implementing the architecture end-to-end really demystified how these models actually work under the hood.
GPT Architecture we implemented
CSE114a — Foundations of Programming Languages
About the class:
The course started with an intro to lambda calculus using Elsa(a small toy functional programming language for learning the ropes). From there, the entire class was taught in Haskell, and we gradually built up to writing our own basic interpreter with type inference by the end.
Topics Covered:
- Lambda calculus
- Intro to Haskell
- Datatypes & Recursion
- Higher-order functions
- Typeclasses
- Environments and closures
- Types, type inference, and polymorphism
Public Course Website: ucsc-cse-114a.github.io/spring26 — lecture notes, assignments, and exams are all posted here.
My thoughts on the class:
This was a genuinely mind-opening class, unlike anything I'd done before, getting to learn the science behind how programming languages are actually designed! It also had one of the best lecturers at UCSC, Prof. Kuper (who happens to be Prof. Rudnick's wife).
Life & Other
Gym progress
Unfortunately couldn't fulfill the dream of benching 225 and squatting 315 before graduating 💔
From Hevy
LeetCode progress
We don't talk about leetcode 🤫
Chess progress
Hit 1600 elo, We are still improving... on road to 2000!
Hit 1600 rapid on chess.com
Grad pics 📸
Going to SJSU for masters.