About

Tidbits

This talk by Rajiv Gandhi, to whom I am grateful. For you if you think, like I used to, that research–or any success in STEM–is out of your reach.

Scott Aaronson's old note on frameworks for reasoning about large numbers, for enjoyment.

Kevin Knight's note on unix commands, to help you with your bash skills.

The Fundamental Whiteboard Difficulty (Scott Aaronson):

I figured that chalk has its problems—it breaks, the dust gets all over—but I could live with them, much more than I could live with the Fundamental Whiteboard Difficulty, of all the available markers always being dry whenever you want to explain anything.

I highly suggest Arch Linux for its configurability and the educational experience it provides…

Contact

Take my school email johnhew@stanford, and predict the TLD using your internal knowledge base.

A bit of history

I was absolutely destroyed by my first year of computer science undergraduate studies; bad grades, late nights, a good amount of crying. My academic advisor Professor Max Mintz asked me what I was doing at Penn, as I was certainly no good at getting good grades. He cared deeply about his students. Out of possible futures, I didn't love software engineering, I wasn't good enough at math to be a quant, and though I was interested in law, my GPA was already too low to get into a good law school (even if I got straight As for the rest of college.)

I tried for a while to explore research. Professor Ani Nenkova was generous enough to spend time mentoring me briefly as a freshman on a project that I, to my discredit, brought nowhere, and eventually dropped. Still, her generosity, and that of Professor Rajiv Gandhi, who believed in me even as I was barely passing his first-year algorithms and discrete mathematics courses, led them to write me letters of recommendation for the Johns Hopkins University Summer Research Experiences program. I am grateful to both of them.

Not expecting to get into the Hopkins program, I applied to the startup of a Penn alum associated with STWing, an amazing nerdy community; I was surprised to get an offer, and a chance to spend the summer in Palo Alto, which I'd recently heard was a hotspot of the technology world. Well, as luck would have it, I got into the Hopkins program, but had already accepted the startup role, so I politely declined Hopkins and prepped for the summer. Just a bit before the summer was to start, I got a call from the startup founder saying they'd run out of runway! No startup, no internship.

At Max Mintz' recommendation, I called the cell phone of the person I'd have worked with at JHU—Professor David Yarowsky—who for whatever reason had his cell number on his website! To my continual amazement, David picked up, and I sheepishly asked if he still had room for me. He did, and I spent the summer studying inflectional morphology for low-resource machine translation. I loved it, and unlike my first year of undergrad, I wasn't bad at it.

Later, Dr. Matt Post agreed to mentor me on running machine translation experiments, and spent an enormous amount of time teaching me as I tried to write my first research paper. The connection with David and Matt led me to Professor Chris Callison-Burch, who kindly allowed me a space in his lab. He mentored me for the rest of my undergraduate research, where I got to work with Professor Charles Yang as well.

By the end of my undergraduate career, I'd mostly caught up with my peers in terms of performance in coursework, but I'd never been the "exceptional" undergrad in courses that some would suggest would be good at research. It was only through the generosity and time of a large number of people that I'd had the chance to do research and thrive.