Looking back on 2023

It’s currently 4:10 AM on December 24, 2023, and I am sitting in the glow of the computer screen, reflecting on what a rollercoaster this year has been. I haven’t really been frequent on blogging; maybe 2024 will change things.

When I entered the 4th semester in January, little did I know it would be one of the best semesters of my undergrad. I had just landed a summer internship at Yonsei Vision and Learning Labs, Seoul, and I couldn’t have asked for more. Diving into core Computer Science courses for the first time was exhilarating, to say the least.

Come March, after navigating through weeks of uncertainty and enduring over seven hours of continuous and intense interviews, I was appointed as the Coordinator of the Programming Club at IIT Kanpur for the 2023-2024 tenure. It felt like everything was falling into place.

In May, I left for Korea for 2.5 months. I performed research under one of the best professors I’ve ever met, Prof. Jonghyun Choi. However, the fever of the intern season meant that my days were spent in the lab, and evenings, often stretching till 2-3 AM, in a coffee shop, rigorously preparing for the upcoming intern season. I spent my weekends sightseeing, and in my 10 weeks, I would have covered most of the tourist spots of Seoul. Korea is a beautiful country, and I would definitely love to visit again.

The fifth semester started in August with one of the lowest points in my life. The intern season had started, and I had been very stingy in my intern applications, applying only to a handful of companies on day 1. I faced surprising rejections from all of them while all my friends got offers. This blow to my self-esteem led me to take a brief retreat back home. Fortunately, I landed a decent placement with Adobe Research in the second week.

The semester was also hectic, with most nights spent on assignments. My friends and I also managed to pull off a Goa trip (cliché!), which made the semester sweeter.

It was in this semester, I got introduced to High Performance Computing when we received an email that Professors Preeti and Swarnendu were forming a team for ISCSCC24. Having no experience at all in this domain, I decided to give it a shot along with one of my friends, Aditya Bangar. We managed to get selected (and I was nominated as the captain) for the IITK team, and our team also got selected to take part in the final event. The work at the Programming Club was also picking up pace, and I decided that the long-running dating app of IIT Kanpur, Puppy Love, built by Saksham Sharma, needed a revamp. I envisioned this with one of my friends, Nikhil, and we got into the development phase of PuppyLove2.0 (blog on it coming soon). I decided to skip participating in the Inter IIT Tech Meet this year as well because I was already loaded up with so much stuff.

December was a month of new endeavors. I attended a workshop on CUDA programming, and, spurred by a newfound interest in Systems, I embarked on a project to build my own OS using Rust. Our team also made significant progress on PuppyLove2.0, now in its deployment phase.

Looking back, this year had its share of regrets, but undeniably, it ranks as one of the best in my life.