I hate clichés, I prefer to avoid them like the plague. However, I do not want to treat starting a blog as an NP complete problem and that’s why, I chose to resort to a known solution.
>> print (“Hello, world!”)
With that out of the way, here are a few bytes about me:
“All my details can be found here ->
(How I wish I could achieve that sort of memory optimisation for a few of my course units!)
Anyway, on to the more important things…
Firstly, how and why I ended up here in Manchester.
Truth be told, Manchester wasn’t actually my top choice at first, but when the list was whittled down to three, Manchester United certainly helped swing the gauntlet!
Moreover, its a university with a rich heritage, it has an entire degree programme option dedicated to the study of Artificial Intelligence and a lot of exciting research being undertaken. The city isn’t overwhelming (looking at you, London!) and has a lot of startup energy. Also the student community here in the CS school is very inclusive, hacker types who know how to have great fun.
The second important thing to tell you is what I intend to use this blog for.
- By letting me write this, I obviously owe the university some gratitude and naturally, I’ll be writing about things such as what it’s like to study here and what it’s like to be an international student at Manchester. I’ll also be honest about the things that I think could be better.
- Chronicling my time here – when I first got here, I thought about maintaining a journal, and I even got a fancy notebook for it! Alas, I couldn’t stick to it, however, this blog should drill some discipline into me on that front.
- Occasional discussion about studying in the UK given the economic and political situation. As an international student, it was one of my primary concerns about coming here and now I can hopefully impart some information about why it’s not such a bad idea after all!
- Data science projects. Every week, I try to take a dataset and derive some compelling insight from it. Now I have a platform to share some really good ones.
- Hackathons. Hackathons are my default weekend setting. Plus it’s a great way to travel the country, meet new people and build cool stuff (more on this next time).
Now, I must get back to my team (you guessed it, at a hackathon 😉 ) who have been giving me the glare as I have been yanking away at my keyboard and not writing anything that compiles to machine code.
Until next time!
Aayush