A Spring in my step
It’s been three weeks since I arrived back at Harvard for the start of my final semester! Time has flown by! After a relaxing break, spending time at home in London being spoiled by my mum’s incredible Indian food and recalibrating my British accent, I’m excited to start a fresh semester.
I came back a little bit before semester officially starts to work on a research project for a class I’m taking at the Institute for Applied Computational Science. As part of a collaboration with Politecnico di Milano I’m working in a group with a couple of Italian students to help the City of Como model and visualise how people move through the city using various data sources like mobile phone connections and social media. The Italian students and professors came over from Italy for a week so we could get a head start on the project. It’s already been a challenging problem, working with messy data sets, and vague guidelines but it’s going to be a valuable experience in what it’s like to be a ‘real-life’ data scientist! Plus a free ‘research’ trip to Como over spring break can’t be that bad! ;)
During this week I also went to a symposium at Harvard on ‘The Computational Economy’, a day of talks about algorithms and data ranging from Bitcoin and Blochain, organ trading and uber pricing, putting some of all the data science theory i’ve learnt over the past semester into a real life context.
It’s been a scary and unpredictable time in the U.S following the inauguration of the new president. I joined the Boston women’s march on the 21st of January on Boston Common, along with 175,000 other people. Several notable women were among those who marched, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Attorney General Maura Healey, who both spoke emphatically about women’s rights and gave hope and strength to those who feared the events of the next four years.
One of the highlights of the past few week was a trip to the TD Garden stadium to watch the Boston Celtics vs the Houston Rockets play in the NBA! The game was incredibly fast paced and I was in awe of how athletic and skilful the players were. Basketball is now officially my favourite American sport!
Last week was class shopping week for Spring and again I tried to pick too many classes! Maybe it takes a few semesters to learn how to do shopping week right! I think I ‘shopped’ nearly 10 classes, ranging from Machine Learning to a Philosophy class on Appearance and Reality!
In the end I’ve decided on classes in Generalised linear models, Data Science part 2 (following on from part 1 last semester) and a really scary Applied Maths class on Stochastic Optimisation (yeah I didn’t know what that mean a week ago either). I’m also sitting in on a class about ‘The Conduct of Life’, a philosophy class about how to life your life through eastern and western philosophies. I’m super excited to try something different, although I’m trying to maximise the technical skills I can learn!
I’ve also started playing cricket again and trained for the first time with the Harvard men’s cricket team! Incredible as it sounds, the Harvard Football stadium gets covered in a massive inflatable dome over the winter which is fully lit, heated to a toasty 90 degrees Farenheight and also pressurised. It’s an amazing feat of engineering! I was definitely a bit rusty playing after nearly 6 months but I’m looking forward to getting back into cricket this semester!
