Seven technical monsters that melted my GPU, broke my brain, and somehow made me love research more.
You want to know the exact moment I became an insufferable PhD scholar?
My first-year induction. I’m 23. I’ve done a few NPTEL courses, built a half-decent MNIST classifier, I think I’m a big shot.
Some final-year senior is presenting his research. His slides aren’t slides. They’re just Greek letters. A dense, terrifying wall of them.
Afterward, I try to sound smart. “That was cool, dada. What was the loss function you used?”
He looks at me. Not in a mean way. Just… tired. Like a Delhi-ite explaining winter to a Mumbai-kar.
“It’s not really a loss function, bhai,” he says. “It’s a non-parametric Bayesian hierarchical model. You read Murphy?”
“Murphy? Like… the old radio company?”
He didn’t even laugh. “No. The Murphy. ‘Probabilistic Perspective.’”
I went back to my cramped desk in the lab, downloaded the 1,200-page PDF, and had my first real, PhD-grade existential crisis. I realized I didn’t just need to learn new things. I needed to re-learn everything I…
