I am thinking about applying for masters in CS in the US. It's already February. I thought about applying before but my mind was dominated by stress and the anxiety of failing classes. I applied many times before, but this is the first time that I am in a such a position. Ok, this is the first time perhaps I am aiming for a non-top-tier school in my life. I am not applying for the top 10 or 20. And any excuses are just futile. Yeah, it's February 10th now. I am late. I am going to try to apply for fall, if it doesn't work, I am going to try to apply for spring. I don't want to wait for too long.

School Tiers

I am applying for research masters in ML/Data Science now and eventually, I want to get a PhD. First I need to know the general tiers of universities in the US. I thought there were only 400 universities in the US when I was looking at USNews. But it turned out like there are thousands of institutions in the US offering a higher education.

CSRankings

If you go on CSRankings and filter for AI in the last 3 years, you see China taking the top 6: Tsinghua, Zhejiang, Peking, SJTU, Nanjing, and USTC, followed by 2 Singaporen universities and a Korean university, while the US is out of the top 10. Change the filter to the last year, and China takes the top 8. Chna takes more than half in the top 20 in "AI" in the recent years on CSRankings. This is so surprising that my university is literally #5 or #6 on that list not only in China, but in the world. Yet on the ground reality is that the top students from Tsinghua, let alone USTC or Jiaotong University would fight for a PhD in the "Big 4", and most would glady take an offer from schools such as UCSD, UCLA. People vote with their feet to go to the US. So basically CSRankings is highly unreliable for the absolute rankings, you can use it to search for professors but you shouldn't use it to rank US schools as well.

On the other hand, if the school appears on the list in CSRankings, it usually means there is a functional PhD program, vice versa. I went on CSRankings and searched for the last 3 years and to my surprise, only 150-200 schools in the US appeared on the CSRankings at all. Most of them are R1, around 10-20 are R2 (some with few faculties on CSRankings).

Basic Picture

Anyway, here are the basic rankings. It all depends on the specific lab and the specific professor, and everything is like "roughly" or treated as a guideline. We clearly can't just copy CSRankings.

• Top (big 4): Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU
• Tier 1.5: UCSD, UCLA, UW, UIUC, UMass Amherst, UMich, Maryland, etc
• Tier 2: UCI, UCSB, USC, Virginia, Chicago, Rutgers, Ohio State, etc
• Tier 3, solid R1 (50-100): UCR, UCSC, Oregon State, George Mason, Colorado Boulder, WashU, Tufts, etc. They do serious research but aren't considered "prestigious", though it all depends on the specific lab and professor.
• Low R1/High R2 (100-150): DePaul, Portland State, Ole Miss, Idaho, Boise, Mizzou, Kansas, West Virignia, Iowa, Hawaii at Manoa, etc. Appears on CSRankings, has a basically functional CS PhD but few professors, maybe 1-3 per field, or they have a very specialized field.
• Unranked/Teaching Universities/CCs: San Jose State, Cal State, Wake Forest, James Madison, Pace, Miami of Ohio, Alaska Fairbanks, etc. No CS research, basically no CS PhDs. You either prepare to get feed directly into the industry, or simply pay to enjoy your life in a school with a funny name. I don't want to be here.

Geography

I've been to US 4 times now

• California and New York (1st grade winter)
• Great lake area and Boston (6th grade summer)
• So-cal and Irvine (7th grade summer)
• Berkeley and Alaska (sophomore exchange year)

So in my mind US has 3 main parts:

• New York and New England ("BSC" in Connecticut, "In the Unlikely Event" in New Jersey, "Wonder" in New York, "Magic Tree House" in Pennsylvania)
• Silicon Valley and California ("La La Land", "The Graduate", "Easy A", "The Joy Luck Club")
• Seattle and Portland ("Twilight" in Forks)

Then there are 3 smaller but still significant areas:

• Florida (hot)
• Texas (hot)
• Chicago and Michigan area

Then there are the "middle of nowhere" states:

• Kansas (Wizard of Oz)
• Missouri (Tom Sawyer)
• Utah (Mormons)
• North Carolina ("Along for the Ride")
• West Virginia (Mountain Mama)
• Alabama (Atticus Finch)
• Mississippi (Roll of Thunder)
• Louisiana (Jambalaya)
• Alaska (Call of the Wild)
• Hawaii (Aloha)
• Puerto Rico (Despacito)

I don't know much about the rest.

My Background

• TOEFL: 109(4 years ago, 16)/105(2 years ago, 18)/104(half a year ago, 20)
• GRE: 155(Verbal)/166(Quant) (4 years ago)

So I am in USTC, studying CS. My overall GPA is 2.7/4.3.

Are you happy? You can laugh at me, it's funny, even if I am crying or doubting my sanity. I don't know if I should blame it on myself or the Chinese CS education. Because here are the courses I took at Cal with literally zero CS foundation in one year I took.

• CS161 Security (A)
• CS170 Algorithms (A)
• EECS149 Embedded (B)
• CS188 AI (B+)
• CS182 DL (B+)
• CS285 RL (C+)
• CS61C Architecture (C+)

2 math courses

• Probability (P, I slipped in the midterm)
• Abstract Algebra (A)

And I came back to USTC, and I still needed to complete the standard CS curriculum in China, and I got slaughtered. And I am finishing my undergrad this year!

I had no research so far. I was too busy dealing with depression and my mental health after the sophomore year. Good news is that I do not have suicidal thoughts right now. My weight went up in a year from 72 kg to 86 kg (and now down to 76 kg). Then I went out walking 10-20 km on desolate streets from midnight to 5 am. My parents were first "very disappointed with me" and completely shocked how "I was fine in Berkeley and we thought everything ahead was cleared". Then last year in May there were "we are graduating" signs in the school and I felt my heart wrench every time I looked at them. I learned Russian largely entirely because of the depression when I would watch YouTube all day as a form of escape. Looking in retrospect, it's divided into 2 phases, the first 2 years I almost didn't know anything about CS, then I was struggling/depressed. I don't blame myself anymore, but once I get my feet inside the master's program, I need to try to write and publish papers. I am very lucky (I am going to graduate from USTC soon after passing the failed courses), optimistic (things would be better almost certainly) and resilient of failure!

Остановились часы, полночь не бьют
Нет больше друзей, которые лгут
Трагикомедия, выход на бис
Занавес медленно падает вниз
Я не играла, я прожила всю эту пьесу
Так, как смогла. Зачем?

(Раневская)

I am not dying for prestige anymore. In short, I am likely paying to get into a tier-3 program. I do like math and CS, but I hate the utilitarian way how most students treat them. I have a romantic, poetic soul. Socializing and human connections are not negligible in my life. This is my valid entertainment and relaxation as I do not game or drink, and dropping it for productivity only results in burnout or depression. I already spent so many years in a sterile environment and the CS/DS department in the US is also going to be quite utilitarian, filled with Asians. I must not spend my Masters and PhD in a sterile university.

Fatalism

掩重门、浅醉闲眠。莫开帘，怕见飞花，怕听啼鹃。

(高阳台·西湖春感, 张炎)

The annoying thing is that you think you did nothing wrong, you followed your logic, you worked normally, you tried, and you still failed spectacularly. In those scenarios you began to doubt your sanity, nihilisim kicks in, and you get fatalistic, and you are unsure about what to do in the future either. Prestige and grades matter less because there's no control over them, while the process of learning and the quality of life begin to matter far more. I mean, this is not the first time that I feel fatalistic. Back in my high school (Jiaotong Affiliated high school), I was getting extremely poor grades on every subject except math and physics that I was almost doomed to fail in Gaokao and not get into a "985". Yeah, even English, when I was reading full-length English novels and watching YouTube without problems, getting a good score in TOEFL. I was always one of the worst in exams. People didn't believe it because I went to USTC at 16, but I went in through the special program where I only needed to take math and physics, and meet a low baseline in Gaokao, which I just managed to reach the exact cutoff line. One point less in Gaokao, or one point less in the specialized exam, I would be dead. But then I failed so hard in USTC ironically. Although for the exchange year in Cal, that was less drama, I just applied and easily got in. Anyway, it's like, I am not going to blame myself anymore or try to force myself too much into solutions that clearly don't work. I display neurodivergent traits and always find bureaucracy more difficult than studying. I study myself anyway. But here I am.

What is the point of grinding when you are losing so much by external standards? The harder you grind, the better university you get into, the more restricted and tired you are, the less you learn, the less time you dedicate to studying. An Asian bubble is the last thing I want. If I get a CS PhD in a mediocre university in the US that my parents and peers looked down previously, as long as I am happy, it is totally fine. I am still smart, I can figure out problems, and I am going to a luxurious industry. For neurodivergent people, one second they are find it effortless where everyone else is struggling, and then they are failing the most basic tasks like an idiot.

No Social Life and Cultural Detachment

The elephant in the room is the lack of social life for 10 years. In my middle school and university, there is a 80-90% male ratio and zero liberal arts majors. I was always denied of a social life, and I need some social life and vitality in the next stage. I largely learned about teenage life from books by Judy Blume, Ann M Martin, John Green, Sarah Dessen. I read hundreds of English YA books from 11-17, and I read far more in English than I did in Chinese.

Because I was repeatedly denied any basic social life and put in a hyper-competitive grinding environment, I could not find my identity during my teen years and share almost no hobbies with my roommates or classmates (who were mostly tired and depressed, mostly into gaming or anime). I do not play video games or board games. I like outdoor walking and aesthetics. This is especially strong in university, as I complained many times already, my roommates are from provinces, never been abroad, has CET-4 English, bad hygiene, rarely showers and cleans, frequently hollering with games but extremely passive and parasocial, there is literally nothing I can talk with them as they usually wear headphones and play gun games on desktop computers for 10 hours a day. Most students here are too burned out, gaming all day in their dorms, and I felt infantilized.

At the same time I was reading so much about American life. I gradually began to detach myself completely from Chinese contents even though I was phyiscally in China and going to Chinese schools. I am highly obsessive. I began to systematically and completely adopt English as my primary language, distancing myself away from the Chinese reality. Since middle school I almost exclusively used English for my journals or personal writings. I process my inner thoughts in English. I mostly consume English (as well as Russian and Spanish) social media contents, spending hours a day on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Telegram, and Chinese social media began to feel foreign to me. I am actively posting contents on TikTok, YouTube, and Telegram channels.

I hated Chinese because the reality in China for me was no dating, extreme introversion, guilt trapping, endless academic stress and constantly failing in classes (though I still like classical Chinese). As long as my life in China wasn't changing into something fun, I am obviously not going to change my hate for Chinese as well.

I always learned by myself instead of being "taught" by someone in school. In fact, being "taught" something usually had an opposite effect for learning, such as high school or CS in USTC. On the other hand, if I am motivated to study something, I do not wait for anyone to teach me, I simply obsess with something for 10 hours a day, such as reading English books, writing, math competitions, learning Russian, web programming and hoarding. Nobody forced me to learn these, and usually learning it requires actively going against the environment everyday. The more stress I have, the less I study.

I learned Russian to fluency in the past 2 years because I liked watching Russian figure skating and ballet, and now I can watch videos at 1.5x speed and read Wikipedia or news without problems. I am not boasting about anything or talking about politics. I am just making a point about the loneliness I had. Anyway, I didn't mention anything related to Russia in my application materials as I am highly paranoid about the situation right now. I don't support the Kremlin anyway and I like Ukrainian. So I removed any mentions of Russian and changed it to Spanish.

We quote Su shi

回首向来萧瑟处，归去、也无风雨也无晴。

(定风波 莫听穿林打叶声)

Some Other Words

A few notes about what I expect

1 Fear of professors

If I am at an American university, I would try to frequent the office hours to talk to the professors. Just talking to the professors a lot makes me fear them less. But if I get good scores, I am also going to be less afraid of professors. When I apply for a PhD, if I am going to apply for a PhD to another university, I need letters of recommendation.

2 Search for professors

The first thing I think is to know the different professors on campus and what they are doing. I need to know their labs and their research publications, and where I can do research or the thesis. If I cannot find a professor in my university, I need to look for professors in other universities and prepare to do a summer research there.

I need to actively search for an advisor who I can get along with to do research, or who is relaxed and do not put too much pressure on me.

3 Social life

An active social life is nonnegligible for my mental wellbeing. Specifically, I need to find campus clubs such as

• Literature/languages/writing
• Public speaking/discussion heavy clubs
• Dancing

There is no such life inside the CS/DS departments. I will be very active and search for such student clubs. I do not like using the semi-anonymous Discord or Reddit or dating apps. I prefer physical, offline socializing. As long as I have an active offline social life with women around, dating and intimacy are secondary factors. I am open to dating but I do not have any time or excessive energy to manage someone else's emotions before I am fully secure. I just want to heal off the trauma of my teenage years and have decent platonic relationships with men and women. Green card through marriage is an option but I don't like the idea of starting a relationship only for green card - I have 3 options anyway, as well as the "Canada route" backup, and my parents had estates in Shanghai (though I don't want to go back).

4 Research

And now we get to research. I need to put far more time into doing research and publishing when I am in my Masters. I am commited so far to doing a PhD.

5 Money and future

We do not need to stress too much on these factors. As for money, I am going to rely on my parents for another 2 years, but after masters I am going to be mostly financially independent. So if everything goes right, my next 5-7 years will be like this in a campus.

I do not plan to join loud parties, drink, smoke, play video games, go on expensive travels, buy expensive gadgets, start a family, engage in addictions, or make my life unnecessarily complicated over the next few years as well. So I think this is how things will look like.

After that I want to get a US green card. I have a chance of getting it through marriage, H1B, or the EB research visa. If that does not work out, I can just study French to get Canada PR and citizenship in 3-5 years, and work in the US anyway.

6 Courses and self-study

I expect the master's minimum coursework at a third-tier university to not be very difficult and curved better. I plan to do the minimum courses required and I do not plan to bother myself with more bureaucracies. I need a 3.0 average to not get kicked out. I expect my average GPA to be 3.3 (B+) at least. To apply for the PhD, finding the right professor and getting publications is more important.

I do not plan to put a huge amount of time into self-studying about other random things unless I am comfortably publishing research and fully secure about the PhD.

The timeline looks like this.

• April/May: Finish my undergrad thesis, get the F1 visa, while reading a lot of their research papers
• July/August: The moment I get a diploma here, massively email every NLP profs, give them my resume and tell them my admission to MS (and obviously, no previous papers), hoping to get one or two replies.
• September: Land in the US, the 15 months ticking clock till December 15th starts. Fight the jetlag, get an apartment, select courses, and try to help a PhD, any PhD student, do some work.
• October - basically a whole year: Do the coursework while spending most of the time locked in a lab or library trying to publish papers.
• November/December next year: Relax a little and prepare materials, , get 3 LORs, email and chat with new profs, apply again, prepare for new interviews, perhaps I can even get a free offer if the current prof likes me, and hopefully get into a top 50 university PhD where the new advisor isn't a sadist.

Some Other Words About USTC?

I associated USTC only with trauma, backward teachings, and students with no curiosity who don't know what Github is. In Cal they had dozens of tech clubs led by students teaching everything, in USTC they only have a CP club and a LUG. All my roommates here are quite passive and introverted and none of them are deep in research as well. You can use the 1/5 rule here in USTC: 1/5 of the students are passionate geniuses enjoying their shit, most of whom aiming directly for a US PhD, all the rest 4/5 are passive 10-hour-a-day parasocial gamers in deep depression. And somehow my roommates right now aren't in the 1/5, their graduation are also delayed and they are in a much worse depression than I am.

However, I looked into CSRankings and there are 20-30 USTC professors, publishing a lot in ML. This got me shocked. And I clicked on some professor's profiles and I think actually some of them are doing some interesting work. But I never knew these professors at all in USTC, they aren't teaching the hardware courses. I went back from the exchange program and took those hardware and systems courses with terrible professors who do no research and use heavily outdated textbook and ppts. That completely broke me and I was not thinking about going to research ever since, I was just trying to graduate to run away. But that does not mean there are no professors here, and some are highly competent, although I did hear that some labs are pure paper mills that use students like slave labors only to churn out useless papers. Anyway, somehow professors in USTC are some of the most approachable ones, and going into a lab is actually very easy here. I have around 10 professor's WeChat. This is quite unthinkable in the US. So I am going to complain as well in the US.

Objectively, Hefei and the extreme gender ratio are too bad for me to stay anyway. But I can't feel but a sense of loss and guilt somehow. There are massive resources right here that I refused to use and overlooked completely, though it wasn't intentional. It feels like literally another extreme cognitive dissonance that I am experiencing all the time. Anyway, going to the US is objectively not a bad idea, especially if you compare it to escaping to Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Southern Europe, and my English is more comfortable than my Chinese. So while it did not change my trajectory or choices, I changed my opinion and withdrew my negative opinions about USTC as a whole.

Previous Posts

• This is the post about my primary school: https://jimchen.me/a/44793e
• This is the post about end of middle school: https://jimchen.me/a/8f2934
• This is the post about high school and getting admitted into USTC: https://jimchen.me/a/67abaf
• This is the post about applying to Berkeley in my second year in USTC: https://jimchen.me/a/53e031
• And this post is about applying to Masters from USTC in my fifth year: https://jimchen.me/a/137f33

user@fedora ~/D/applying-for-masters (master)> tree
.
├── CV
│   ├── Jiamu_Chen_CV.pdf
│   ├── Jiamu_Chen_CV.tex
│   └── template.tex
├── LOR
│   ├── LOR-1
│   │   ├── LOR-1-draft.pdf
│   │   ├── LOR-1-draft.tex
│   │   ├── LOR-1.pdf
│   │   └── LOR-1.tex
│   ├── LOR-2
│   │   ├── LOR-2-draft.pdf
│   │   ├── LOR-2-draft.tex
│   │   ├── LOR-2.pdf
│   │   └── LOR-2.tex
│   ├── LOR-3
│   │   ├── LOR-3-draft.pdf
│   │   ├── LOR-3-draft.tex
│   │   ├── LOR-3.pdf
│   │   └── LOR-3.tex
│   ├── LOR-4
│   │   ├── LOR-4-draft.pdf
│   │   ├── LOR-4-draft.tex
│   │   ├── LOR-4.pdf
│   │   └── LOR-4.tex
│   └── ustc-logo.png
├── SOP
│   ├── Arizona-State-University
│   │   ├── Arizona-State-University.pdf
│   │   └── Arizona-State-University.tex
│   ├── Auburn-University
│   │   ├── Auburn-University.pdf
│   │   └── Auburn-University.tex
│   ├── Brandeis-University
│   │   ├── Brandeis-University.pdf
│   │   └── Brandeis-University.tex
│   ├── DePaul-University
│   │   ├── DePaul-University.pdf
│   │   └── DePaul-University.tex
│   ├── Emory-University
│   │   ├── Emory-University.pdf
│   │   └── Emory-University.tex
│   ├── George-Mason-University
│   │   ├── George-Mason-University.pdf
│   │   └── George-Mason-University.tex
│   ├── New-Jersey-Institute-of-Technology
│   │   ├── New-Jersey-Institute-of-Technology.pdf
│   │   └── New-Jersey-Institute-of-Technology.tex
│   ├── Northeastern-University
│   │   ├── Northeastern-University.pdf
│   │   └── Northeastern-University.tex
│   ├── SOP_template.tex
│   ├── Syracuse-University
│   │   ├── Syracuse-University.pdf
│   │   └── Syracuse-University.tex
│   ├── Tufts-University
│   │   ├── Tufts-University.pdf
│   │   └── Tufts-University.tex
│   ├── University-of-Arizona
│   │   ├── University-of-Arizona.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Arizona.tex
│   ├── University-of-Arkansas
│   │   ├── University-of-Arkansas.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Arkansas.tex
│   ├── University-of-Chicago
│   │   ├── University-of-Chicago.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Chicago.tex
│   ├── University-of-Cincinnati
│   │   ├── University-of-Cincinnati.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Cincinnati.tex
│   ├── University-of-Delaware
│   │   ├── University-of-Delaware.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Delaware.tex
│   ├── University-of-Georgia
│   │   ├── University-of-Georgia.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Georgia.tex
│   ├── University-of-Kentucky
│   │   ├── University-of-Kentucky.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Kentucky.tex
│   ├── University-of-New-Hampshire
│   │   ├── University-of-New-Hampshire.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-New-Hampshire.tex
│   ├── University-of-Oklahoma
│   │   ├── University-of-Oklahoma.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Oklahoma.tex
│   ├── University-of-Oregon
│   │   ├── University-of-Oregon.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Oregon.tex
│   ├── University-of-Vermont
│   │   ├── University-of-Vermont.pdf
│   │   └── University-of-Vermont.tex
│   └── Washington-University-in-St-Louis
│       ├── Washington-University-in-St-Louis.pdf
│       └── Washington-University-in-St-Louis.tex
└── transcripts
    ├── Berkeley-Combined.pdf
    ├── Berkeley-Fall-and-Spring.pdf
    ├── Berkeley-Summer.pdf
    ├── english-tests
    │   ├── GRE.pdf
    │   └── TOEFL.pdf
    ├── 在读证明中英文_出国用_陈加木(PB21000002).pdf
    └── 普通成绩单英文_出国用_陈加木(PB21000002).pdf

32 directories, 72 files

Applying

I want to apply for CS/AI/DS MS for now to prepare for the transition to PhD.

• A functional AI/DS PhD program (so if I slip during the Masters I can just stay), appears on CSRankings, and accessible with low GPAs (2.7, lower in the last 60 credits)
• At least 50% female overall (NOT a "tech institute"), no big Asian bubble, green campus and not stressful

Right now is not the time to learn about the US geography and culture differences, campus tours, literature clubs, or humanities departments of every university. This is just procrastination. As long as the school has a good female gender ratio and a functional CS program, I will apply. I'll decide when I'm actually admitted by some. I have a list of around 40-50 schools. After crossing out those whose deadlines I missed, I have around 20-30 left. It's already March.

• [x] Transcripts & English Tests (2 exchange, 1 USTC, TOEFL, GRE)
• [x] CV
• [x] Statement of Purpose (SOP)
• [ ] Letter of Recommendation (LOR)

I applied to these schools at March 1-2 (No LORs)

• DePaul University
• George Mason University
• New Jersey Institute of Technology

SOP (Brandeis example)

I was admitted to the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) at 16 through a difficult program for students with math competition backgrounds. I initially chose the math major before transitioning to Computer Science in my sophomore year.

In my sophomore year, I applied and went to a one-year exchange program at the University of California, Berkeley. I adapted quickly to the open-ended, project-heavy environment. Despite being only a sophomore, I took a total of 6 highly demanding upper-division courses in a year. I earned an 'A' in CS 170 (Algorithms) and CS 161 (Security), and strong grades (B+) in both CS 188 (Artificial Intelligence) and CS 182 (Deep Learning). I was deeply engaged with AI and Machine Learning, and I took a graduate-level course in Machine Learning: CS 285 (Deep Reinforcement Learning). In CS 285 (Deep Reinforcement Learning), I moved beyond theory, writing implementations for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) for offline RL, and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithms. Despite being a little overwhelmed by the course at the time, I reviewed all the materials and did all the experiments myself again after the semester finished.

I am always interested in applying the knowledge I learned in class.

After studying web security in the Computer Security course, I discovered and reported a critical XSS and cookie-hijacking vulnerability in my home university's official educational platform, which could allow students to log in as TAs through parsing markdown into HTML without sandboxing to steal the cookie.

Inspired by the LLM fine-tuning techniques in the Deep Learning course, I tried fine-tuning LLMs including Cohere Command R and GPT-4o on my personal blog (150k words total at that time) through different approaches, such as generating a question for each sentence or paragraph, and feeding the first part of sentences as the question and the later part of a sentence as the answer. I studied how models can imitate a human blogger and how they can retain information after imitation.

I always had a strong desire to scrape and analyze online data. I scraped around 170k comments from Douban (an online forum) discussions to analyze the contents and tones of users, and I built a frontend with Next.js to search for terms efficiently in real time, as the website does not have a decent search function.

To me, computer science is far more than just a sterile subject in school, but is woven into everyday life and utilities.

My old blog was on WeChat, which, unfortunately, is very inconvenient for me: it is prone to censorship, you are unable to edit posts later, and it does not support external links. After learning full-stack development, I migrated my blog to my own website with Markdown, CI/CD from GitHub, and a Postgres database as a backend.

When I was learning Spanish, I wanted to have dual subtitles for videos. So I built an automated pipeline utilizing Cloudflare R2, AWS EC2, and Docker to scrape and process over 400 GB of diverse video content from YouTube. I optimized instances of Faster-Whisper and Helsinki NLP on cloud GPUs, generating dual subtitles and writing them back via ffmpeg. I then built a full-stack Go/Crystal and Next.js platform to host and stream the data for learning Spanish with dual subtitles. Although later, I found out that YouTube's built-in subtitles work fine, and dual subtitle display is achievable through a browser extension. As I found existing extensions inconvenient or paid, I built an open-sourced extension for dual subtitles on YouTube on my own, which now has 40 users.

I believe in the openness of computing. I spent time reading the original Git source code to understand its raw index, blob, and tree implementations. I tried different open operating systems including BSD and the mobile PostmarketOS. I experimented with self-hosting open-source software, and hosted Mastodon (social media), Gitea (git service), and Metabase (a data processing tool) on AWS, in an attempt to build a parallel self-controlled, open social media system for myself.

My traditional academic path is not without struggles. Returning from Berkeley's ecosystem to the rigidly structured, highly traditional style of my home university resulted in a period of academic struggle, delaying my graduation by a year. The experience taught me that my true motivation does not come from chasing GPAs, but from my intrinsic passion and curiosity. I spent the summer at HKUST researching the relevance of physical data and location detection. My time as a summer research intern at HKUST taught me that I need more formal research experience on top of my engineering skills.

At Brandeis University, I am drawn to the M.S. in Computer Science and the Brandeis Lab for Linguistics and Computation. I have a special linguistic background that I believe is incredibly valuable for computational linguistics research: I am a native speaker of Chinese. As I immersed myself in English in primary school and middle school, reading hundreds of novels and writing many book reviews and travel blogs on my website, I now mainly use English as my primary language for writing and living. I am actively learning Spanish. I am drawn to the intersection of NLP research and linguistics, including the work of Professor James Pustejovsky and Professor Nianwen Xue. I am looking forward to studying in the picturesque, historic Waltham city and Boston area in New England. I am ready to fully dedicate myself to graduate-level research.

I thank the admissions committee for your time and consideration.

Update Mid-March

In a span of 2 months, my mindset has drastically changed.

• In January, I was worried about passing the digital circuit final exam and several other courses. It is a sophomore course and I was retaking it. If I failed, I would not be able to graduate this year. I did not yet cared about applying. Fortunately, through tremendous amount of effort, I got 67.
• In February, I found out I passed all courses last semester and I only had computer organization and the thesis left. It became clear that I can soon graduate if I pass the course this semester. I began to think about applying for MS and wrote the first part of this blog. I wanted to quickly find any R1 US school to get out of this male-dominated, introverted, provincial, and traumatic environment this fall as soon as possible. I wasn't really thinking of anything else.
• Then I suddenly got admitted by NJIT and DePaul. And I had around 2 months to unpack the extreme pressure, anxiety, and depression. And my academic probation cleared. And suddenly I am right back on track at the previous path of pursuing a PhD in the US, just delayed by one year and probably going to a less prestigious university. Somehow this goal was abandoned for a long time. And now my goals and priorities are perfectly clear again. I dropped a lot of schools.

I got a little unhinged when I realized that everything were essentially "cleared" and I am heading out of this male-dominated, nerdy, anti-social environment in such a short time. I could only sleep for 5-6 hours a day for a week. It kind of mirrored the end of my middle school in a math-competition-heavy, male-dominated, high pressure class and I thought I was escaping as well. At that time I slept for 6-7 hours a day and I would naturally wake up at 5 or 6 am energized. Spoiler: although my high school class was gender balanced and I only stayed there for one year, it specialized in Gaokao, not in math competitions or applying to the US, and last time went catastrophically bad. Anyway, my sleeping schedule stablized back to 8 hours now.

Клюет, и бросает, и смотрит в окно,
Как будто со мною задумал одно.
Зовет меня взглядом и криком своим
И вымолвить хочет: «Давай улетим!

Мы вольные птицы; пора, брат, пора!
Туда, где за тучей белеет гора,
Туда, где синеют морские края,
Туда, где гуляем лишь ветер... да я!...»

(Узник, Александр Пушкин)

I am probably going into AI. I hate hardware and systems now, and it's hard to leverage my advantage in math there. I don't even want to do robotics because I hate hardware. I don't want to do CV yet because I don't use CV or video generation much in my daily life unlike LLMs that I am obsessed with, though I am certainly open to intersections. So for now it's NLP. For doing a PhD, finding the right advisor/lab and publishing articles are the most important factors. I missed almost all PhD deadlines and I have no publications now. I am still applying to an MS, but now I am thinking of Masters as just a mini-PhD where I just research for 2 years. I need to go to a school either with a huge CS department or where I can find an interesting professor/lab on CSRankings to date around with before the PhD "marriage". The absolute ranking doesn't matter as much as the specific NLP lab.

Beware of those "interdisciplinary ML" professors, especially with "bio", "health", "chem", "physics", "iot", "finance", they likely have no idea what they are doing. My mom and my aunt work in healthcare/medicine. These professors are essentially publishing a lot of useless shit. I met such a professor in the HKUST summer research during the height of my depression, and my depression and sleep inversion got worse where I sometimes went down to the shore at 3-5 am and then watch the sunrise. You will think it's your problem when the professor scolds you and your self-esteem will be destroyed, or you will just drop out. And I couldn't look at that blog without getting emotional in the mix of nostalgia for beauty of Hong Kong, and deep isolation and depression at the time. From my previous blog: https://jimchen.me/a/7615fb

So like there is a grad student who had written some TCN code, and I was supposed to look at it. But like there were too many obvious mistakes, like, just in his code in almost every blocks.

Like these mistakes include: Putting 2 GB datasets inside Git and refusing LFS or S3, Using a sliding window but throwing away 99 percent of data by hardcoding the length you need to traverse to get the sliding window, Mixing the Training and Validation data, Cheating by manipulating the testing data.

Well these mistakes makes me seriously question the Integrity of HKUST, and like how crappy this school's PhD research really is? I thought as a novice everyone should be better than me, but what the hell is that?

I don't mean anything bad for HKUST, in fact, such professors are everywhere if you look on CSRankings. Institue prestige and good grades do not guarantee that someone knows their shit. In fact, the more people sprinkle themselves with empty words, usually the less passion they actually have for their field.

Because I was fighting an existential crisis of hardware classes, I became nihilistic and fatalistic. It was just like fighting Chinese, English, or Chemistry in high school. Finally the period of crisis is near its end. If you asked me 2 years ago about what I want to do, I would just say that I am overwhelmed by the courses and I know I wanted a PhD but I couldn't figure out mathematically how to do research, find suitable labs, and pass the exams in less than one year. Then obviously I failed. I wanted an MS admission to give myself some space to breathe from the year abroad and think about research then. But the courses only strangled me more. My parents thought since I could manage Cal's upper divs easily, I should have no problems passing the course here, and heavily pressured me into doing research and a quick graduation. Though that was my fault as well because I had never taken any meaningful CS course in USTC except C and data structures. Then I selected 10 courses in one semester and I literally shut down. I thought I was a failure at Berkeley when my peers were all doing research in their sophomore years and publishing, while I was getting Bs and Cs in the upper divs. But objectively it was a success as I took 6 upper divs in CS, while the undergrad requirement in Cal was 5. USTC undergrad is objectively bad for me, and I would trade a mediocre US state school with it, where I can at least have a happy college life.

At the end of the day, I am still fundamentally a math/cs person, and I realized back in high school that losing this identity is worse than losing anything else. Besides, to thrive in the Capitalist society, you need hard skills as the base. I do not want to go to an economically depressed place like a provincial Russian city or the rural parts of a red state in the US. Languages, literature, history, geography are things I do as an entertainment or to disguise as a polymath. The fact is in pop culture, a math/cs person is a nerd who doesn't actually have passion. When I talked about hooking up a vps, scraping data, or reading source code, my classmates have no interest in any of that. They view GitHub strictly utilitarian, which shocked me. Many professors are like that as well. But societal archetypes do not dictate the objective reality of who I am. The Chinese bureaucracy machine cannot erase my identity.

I need to get out of the prolonged depression and isolation. I am tired of grand visions and any collectivist narratives. I need to move out of China if I can for now. I am making it clear, without pretentiousness, that I literally feel a lot of friction operating in Chinese and I cannot fluently express nuances anymore without translating into Chinese in my head. If by some chance, my parents cannot afford the American MS tuition, then I am going to Eastern Europe (EU countries). If I must stay in China, my primary task is to prevent a total mental collapse and suicide ideation instead of any ambitions or goals. Psychologically it is very difficult, almost allergic for me to work in a Chinese environment right now. So I am 100% serious that if I must stay in China, I would be a tour guide for foreigners in Shanghai. I am confident that I will be in the top percentages of the job and it can make a decent living, as I use English as my primary language and I have a YouTube channel in English.

In short, for PhD

• I am looking for a professor/lab where the "Research Interest" is quite specific, does not change drastically, and isn't filled with buzzwords. I must be able to understand the research easily.
• I do not want to work with "paper mill" professors (who publishes just too many). Check for "tenure-track". I know NLP is a competitive field, but I can go to tier-3 R1 schools or do another field, and I certainly do not deserve to be in a state of panic or terror.
• I am currently allgeric to "bio", "chem", "health", "interdisciplinary" (except for linguistics). I know I would drop out of such a PhD. I would rather do research in theory, applied math, security, or even pure math. In the very least, it needs to be strictly math/CS/NLP focused.

And so far, I am searching for labs or professors on CSRankings. After deciding to go to a school and graduating from USTC, I will immediately contact the relevant professors. Also I can look them up on PI rating websites and email the grad students to learn about the lab. If I can do some meaningful research during MS, I can potentially go to a better lab for PhD. Somehow NLP is a very elitist field, like, almost all research are concentrated in top schools, unlike for example, "chem" or "bio" where everyone can pretend they are doing something. There was only one professor actively publishing in NLP in NJIT, who went away back to China. So it is very likely that I go somewhere and find zero professors in NLP, but it's fine as I can do CV or general LLMs, just no "healthcare".

I heard academic is just a very small circle in a specific field and everyone knows each other. And how LOR matters the most in the PhD application. It suddenly made me think academics, politics, corps, elite sports are all power structures and share similar features.

GPA Minimum and Direct Emailing/Calling

If the university explictly lists "3.0" as a requirement, I will send an email and call them to confirm. So I am in active email/phone contact with them. Most of these universities are still open to applications, so I am still within time.

Sometimes they write "3.0 undergrad GPA" as a requirement on their website, but when you email them and you're like, "Can I apply with an undergrad GPA lower than 3.0?" Augusta was like, "you can definitely apply", Iowa was like, "That would be up to the program". Auburn was like, "we typically requires 3.0, you should demonstrate significant strength in other areas," Idaho was like, "the grade must be 3.0, but you can be considered if you write a statement or show your experience". West Virginia was like, "We offer provisional graduate admission below 2.75 GPA", I called Syracuse and they were like, "Absolutely, we offer admissions to 2.5, 2.6 applicants." I called Kentucky and they were like, "Yes, we accept GPA below 3.0 but it must be above 2.75." and I said, "Can I still apply with GPA below 2.75?" She was like, "Um, yes, but you have to talk to the department director Simone." Then she sent me an email and be like, "I copied Simone so he is aware of your inquiries." I called Washington State and they were like, "yeah, you can definitely apply, we wait until all your materials are submitted then look into it." I called University of Oklahoma, and she was like, "yes, sometimes if you provide your background or history. We have a minimum GPA but you can reach out to the department director Jean. They do it case by case, they won't tell you whether you can or not on the phone." As it was like 4 am and I was yawning and I thought I accidentally called Oklahoma State and I called the same number again and it was quite funny, she was like, "you just called and asked the same question?"

Almost no mid-tier R1 universities I am applying to have strict cutoffs. For some schools you can never reach them by phone or email at all.

Different Flavors of Programs

I thought about these MS programs and how get into PhD

NYU Tandon, Washington, UChicago MPCS, Northeastern satellite campuses all seemingly want to put you directly into the industry. They clearly don't want you to do any research. I don't think there's any free lunch here with the brand name. ASU has literally a million students. While it is not entirely impossible to find an Assistant Professor and do some research, there will be a million students fighting for crumbs. UC schools' deadlines had mostly passed.

I looked up the grad school enrollment stats from NYTimes in 2023. Here are some schools with the highest International student percentage (the "holy crap")

• Stevens: Total 3392, International 88% (excuse me?)
• NJIT: Total 2475, International 81% (asked for your WeChat handle during the application process, gave a "10k" scholarship to me, which I think it gives to everyone accepted)
• U.T. Dallas: Total 6987, International 71%
• Northeastern: Total 13881, International 69% (I think even if you remove the Seattle, Silicon Valley, Oakland, Maine, Arlington campuses, it is still very bad even in Boston. I got an email saying "You’re invited to the Chinese student meetings in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou")
• NYU: Total 21155, International 50%

To be fair, Brandeis is also on the list with 1212, 44%, but it was known mainly as a liberal arts college? Honestly don't ask me, I haven't been there, I don't know.

Here are some ideas

• Flavor 1: (xxx Institute of Technology) NJIT, Stevens, WPI, RIT, etc. They have easy admissions and decent researchers. But I don't want to go to a tech institute now.
• Flavor 2: (a private university) Brandeis, Tufts, Syracuse, Emory, WashU, etc
• Flavor 3: (a medium R1 university) Vermont, New Hampshire, Wayne, Iowa, Oklahoma, etc

Then I recalled my experience in Cal, and why I felt like a terrible failure that year and how I did no research. There were like a million undergrads and exchange students from Tsinghua, Peking, already with publications, all trying to get into research. "URAP" (undergrad research) is "open" to exchange students, but it is a joke for you to get in. I had zero CS experience at all and just changed my major.

In the second semester, I still didn't get into research, and several other aggressive students arrived. There was literally a number 1 kid in GPA from USTC there (now at Stanford), and several other extremely competitive people from USTC, fighting to get into research. I didn't know if they succeeded or not as I largely ignored the group to protect my mental health. Then there was the DL course, and they were always in the same room in Soda Hall. I began hating Soda Hall. Then there a research event with like 10 research opportunities for top NLP/AI, but the hall had a thousand students in it. It was a sad story. My favorite places were the West Berkeley shops, Emeryville, and the Durant Avenue 1-2 am snacks.

Anyway, let's not be self-defeating and it isn't 100% that I can't get into research if I hustle, but this is just objectively a very uncomfortable position to be in. You don't want a terminal MS program there. Cal is genuinely a good place. The whole campus is alive with dozens of different clubs (though I got into none, they required two rounds of interviews) and people having fun with tech, while USTC has zero culture like that. Cal students are actually far more competent and aggressive in CS, while their undergrad courses are much more lenient. I spent a lot of time at Moffitt and the "main stacks" cold-war bunker. So yeah, MS in a university with a million CS undergrads/exchange/MS students or a terminal program is a very bad idea for my PhD dream.

Didn't Apply (Got first admission)

I made a huge list first, but after getting the first admission I dropped a lot of schools in the midwest or with tiny CS departments.

• Oklahoma State University (CS)
• Ole Miss (CS)
• West Virginia University (CS)
• University of Denver (CS)
• University of Idaho
• Boise State University (DS)
• Mizzou (DS)
• Southern Methodist University (DS)
• University of Rhode Island (CS)
• Augusta University (DS)

Deadline Missed

• Indiana University Bloomington
• University of Kansas
• Ohio University
• Baylor University
• Utah State University
• University of South Carolina
• University of Nebraska–Lincoln
• Kansas State University
• The University of Nevada, Reno
• Colorado State University
• Florida State University
• Brigham Young University
• University of Pittsburgh
• University of Massachusetts Amherst
• University of Utah
• University of Maryland, College Park
• Purdue University
• University of Wisconsin–Madison
• University of Colorado Boulder
• Ohio State University
• Oregon State University (CS)
• Michigan State University
• University of Central Florida
• New York University

LORs

If they agree to write LOR for me, I will thank them and buy them some gifts. These are the teachers I will be asking for LORs.

• [x] Bei Hua (Professor, Thesis advisor)
• [x] Lei Gong (Associate Professor, Head Teacher)
• [x] Shuai Shao (Professor, Previous Head Teacher)
• [x] Baizong Wang (Instructor, got 99 in Intro to C)

I will send the LORs to them at once in 2 phases. There are actually a lot of fear in contacting with the professors here directly. I failed too many courses and I rarely talked to them, so I need to frequent office hours later.

Final Applying Results (23)

March 1

• New Jersey Institute of Technology (No LOR): March 12 🟢 Admit (AI)
• DePaul University (No LOR): March 17 🟢 Admit (CS)

March 2

• George Mason University (No LOR): March 27 🟢 Admit (AI)

March 17

• Arizona State University (No LOR): April 9 🟢 Admit (AI)

March 19

• Wayne State University (No LOR, No SOP): March 23 🟢 Admit (AI)

March 24

• University of Vermont: April 8 🔴 Reject (CS)
• University of Oklahoma: Applied (CS)

March 27

• University of Oregon: Applied (DS)

March 28

• University of Arizona: April 3 Dept Admit April 16 🔴 Grad School GPA Reject (CS)

March 30

• Syracuse University: April 15 🔴 Reject (CS)
• University of Delaware: May 9 🟢 Admit (AI)
• University of Arkansas: April 3 Oral Admit May 1 🟢 Admit (CS, PhD)
• University of Kentucky: Applied (CS)
• Emory University: April 23 🟢 Admit (CS)
• Washington University in St Louis: April 7 🟢 Admit (STAT)
• Northeastern University Boston: April 3 🟢 Admit (CS, AI, DS)
• University of Chicago: May 15 🔴 Reject (CS)
• University of Cincinnati: April 11 🟢 Admit (CS)
• University of Georgia: April 22 🟢 Admit (CS)
• Auburn University: April 10 🔴 Reject (CS)
• Tufts University: April 24 🔴 Reject (AI)
• University of New Hampshire: May 8 🟢 Admit (CS)

March 31

• Brandeis University: April 13 🟢 Admit (CS)

Choosing a School

You don't roll a dice or rely on gut feeling. You look up preferred labs on CSrankings, and email a professor, be like, "Do your lab have openings for incoming MS students? I am admitted to the CS/AI MS program, and I already took DL, RL, Algo, Linear Algebra." If they agree, then go.

PhD Interview

Professor Xintao Wu from University of Arkansas sent me an email on April 2nd saying he would like to have a 45-minute interview with me as I mentioned wanting to join "SAIL" in the SOP. He was a professor at UNC Charlotte till 2014. I looked up the professor and he is also an alumni of USTC and graduated in 1994. He has the "Acxiom Endowed Chair" (which means funding?) and is the top publisher in Arkansas on CSRankings (basically because that's where I looked up professors and put them in my SOP). I thought usually you don't get interviews with professors when applying to masters as there are thousands or more applicants and professors are busy. Even if you do, I think it is very rare for a professor to reach out first when I didn't even email the professor beforehand. And somehow I went on the website of Arkansas and it said students "must have a 3.0 GPA from bachelors", and the "SAIL" lab also listed "3.0 grade" in the requirements. So I went to read some papers for the interview.

So I spoke with Professor Wu for an hour on April 3rd, and we talked a lot, but mostly in Chinese. He asked about my academic background and my failures in school, and I explained that I was in a bad state after I went back to USTC and I said I am considering AI. He asked if I would be graduating, I said yes and I said the transcripts showed me retaking and passing courses. He expressed understanding and he said he is fine with that as I am from USTC. He asked how I found out about the programs in Berkeley and HKUST, I said I applied and mostly paid for myself in the Berkeley exchange program with some reimbursements, while the HKUST program was a school program, but you still need to apply. He asked about how I found Arkansas, I said CSRankings. I asked about 2 papers. He asked me about the projects I wrote in my SOP and my grad thesis and I told him about it. He asked me if I can code, and I told him about my projects, and I said I can implement ideas mostly without much problems. I told him how I implemented a transformer and I could put different book texts into it and generate something with the author's style. So he is mostly doing LLM privacy, and I asked about the "unlearning" process. It was about "attention masking" or something. I asked if it worked like, "John Smith lives in this street" and then hiding it. The professor said it doesn't work like this, but work for a specific record classification for copyrighted labels. He said that is partially the work of another vision transformer paper about hiding the face or something. I said I was curious if he tried to jailbreak it in different languages (such as "Де живе Гаpрі ПотTэр?") and he said they didn't really try it. Then I asked about another paper, which is from a student who worked in Walmart. Though, he discouraged "free exploration" and reading "systems code". He told me about the offers like Amazon or Google, or tenure tracks his former PhD students got. A lot of those students are Chinese and he said some went back to China. He said that his students are all well above the "average level" in Arkansas. (fair enough, he and another Postdoc student in the group are the top publishers on CSRankings in Arkansas by a huge margin) He said he have 1 Postdoc and 4 PhDs currently, 2 of his PhDs are graduating, and he is hiring 2 more PhDs this year. He already had one, and he is considering me. He asked me about my plans and he said he can tell the committee and transfer me directly to PhD. He said that MS in America is usually 2 years, and you still have to do a 4-5 years PhD after that, if you do PhD here you can do a PostDoc in a better school. I asked about whether his PhD students are being "pushed", he said the Chinese students work really hard, but if you don't want to work hard and just want a job, he will try to help you succeed as well. He said he have 3 million dollars endowment and he can use the interest for funding. Then we talked about curiosity and exploration. I said I have passion for computer science. He said you must publish in a PhD. I said I should be more modest. So basically he is suggesting me be more utilitarian. I said it and I was like, "You mean like being instrumental?" He smiled a little and he was like, "You are young and you can afford a few years exploring, you certainly can have curiosity, but they may end in failure." He suggested that you have to work much harder than the local Americans for success. Anyway, I said I was really thankful how a professor took an hour to talk to me and I said I thought professors are busy. He said if I got better offers, I can certainly take it. Then the meeting ended.

I received an email, where Professor Wu emailed the Department Head Roy McCann that he would like to have me in his group with "potential RA support", and Roy McCann (Head for Academics & Graduate Coordinator) told me to email the Graduate Admissions Office and provide the GRE score. I immediately confirmed my intention to join the lab. Then Jennifer Sandridge (Director of Graduate & International Admissions) completed the academic level change of my application to the PhD program. Then I went to the application portal again and uploaded a few empty PDFs for some requirements, and it went into the security clearance process.

Let's be completely honest, there doesn't seem to be any "hacker culture" or deep passion for CS in Arkansas (reading soure code does not register for fun to them), the culture does seem utilitarian, and his English was heavily accented (he switched to Chinese in the first minute). But on the plus side, he is already tenured, he has papers in ACL/EMNLP/AAAI in the last 2 years, I get good funding, I literally get a direct PhD, it is a gender-balanced university, and I think he is relatively lenient and cool about graduation. And for my specific profile at this moment, it is far more than what I believe I could ask for. If I go to a regular MS program, I have the huge burden of fighting to get research with just any NLP professor in a Capitalist program, getting a good GPA in the required courses (it is not "trivial"), and finally I might still land at a utilitarian, high-pressure, possibly a tenure-track, sadist professor, and start the PhD only by then. If I go straight to a PhD, I can quickly pivot my focus to reading and publishing papers.

Basically it is futile to argue right now. I sent an email to Karuna (a student graduating this year from the lab), Aneesh (another student graduating from the lab), and Min Hao (a student who graduated last year, now in Google) scheduled a video chat. From the professor's perspective, I am an "unknown variable" who is perhaps good at math but very arrogant, uncooperative, lacking in self-awareness, and who failed a lot of basic courses. The last thing I want is to alienate or irritate my potential advisor when I have no leverage. The most important thing right now is publications. If I can't publish a paper, the burden is fully on me and I would fail the PhD anyway. I must be cooperative for now. As long as I am actually publishing something, I think I can have some freedom and the rest of the time is mine.

Lab Culture (Per accounts of the students I spoke to)

• Work-life balance: Very pushy or hands-off? Work hours in the lab?
  • Weekly group meetings and 1-to-1 meetings, people are in the lab for several hours a day (half a day maybe?) but not 996. If you aren't meeting your potential, Dr. Wu will tell you to work harder.There are moments where he will tell you your idea is wrong but you really want to do it.
  • It depends. Expected to come from Monday to Friday. On average 8 hours, but nobody cares if you are missing. Professor has own office. 1 meeting with you per week, 1 meeting with the whole lab.
  • 8 hours a day, you should come to the lab, one to one meeting and group presentation weekly. You can meet other students.
• Lab culture: Collaborative or people work independently? Do they speak Mandarin?
  • You can choose to collaborate with other people. You can also choose to collaborate with other faculties. (actually, Dr. Wu and another Postdoc in the university are both from USTC, ok) But every paper usually has a main "first-author". Actually there is only one part-time PhD student from China now, the rest 4 from India, Vietnam, Nepal, and South America, 2 are graduating, so they mostly speak English (but somehow the professor interviewed me in Mandarin). The professor had a lot of former Chinese students though (and from his time in UNC Charlotte).
  • We have collaborations. There are other Chinese professors Dr. Wu is working with.
  • Weekly one-to-one meeting and group meeting. Other than that your schedules are quite flexible and it depends on you. You can talk to people around the school.
• Funding: How much a month? TA vs RA? GPU?
  • Stipend is 2000 dollars a month. Says you have to find a roommate. (really?) Has a scholarship but she thought it passed for this year. 4 years RA, 1 year TA. Has some funding from the chair. Has some NSF grants, they are ending. He is writing new grants. Has university wide V100, A100, and some H100s. Didn't tell me about the details though.
  • Not sure, ask Dr. Wu. Dr. Wu allow you to do internships, but you can also stay in the lab to do more research. Students take internships in the summer and Dr. Wu allow that.
  • Dr. Wu pays you in the summer to do research. He pays you. You don't have to live in a shared bedroom.
• Graduation
  • Professor Wu doesn't keep you around like a slave labor for 8 years. If he thinks you are failing, you will "master-out", as seen on the "Alumni – MS Graduate" at the bottom of the lab page. If you are doing a PhD, you usually graduate in 5 years, or 4 years if you had a Master's.
  • Once he feel that you are ready to graduate with 4-5 papers, you can do a dissertation, and he will not keep you for long. He is fair to students. In the summer you can stay in the lab, or you can do an internship.
  • There are very few industry jobs that exactly match your direction. In the US if you have done good research, you use that to search for a job.

Admission Delay

MS send offers really quick, sometimes within a week. However, incoming PhDs need to go through a security clearance process as I am from China. So I paid the deposit for WashU and Brandeis.

If I must go to an MS, I will probably go to WashU or Brandeis. WashU sent me an email about how their students are receiving PhD offers. They posted the students' MS thesis on their website. Brandeis sent me an email with a "faculty spotlight" PDF and an hour long video for CS students where each professors talked for a while.

I sent an email to Professor Liuba Shira in Brandeis and asked for a chat, but the email ended up in my spam folder (perhaps because of the Eastern European/Hebrew nature of the name?). I called Brandeis and chatted with someone named Anna. I asked her how many students they have for MS and PhD, and whether there are over a thousand MS students. She said there was only 10-20 admitted masters in CS each year. I was so surprised and I said that is a huge relief, then I realized that I was one of the less than 20 admitted students. So there are indeed opportunities for research, and it looks appealing to me. Then professor Liuba and professor Antonella chatted with me (she emailed me again and it didn't go in the trash). They confirmed the program is 10-20 students and they told me I have to chose my courses to align with my research later on. Liuba said I need recommendation letters. I asked if the grants are changing or you must work on a grant that a professor had. Then Professor Liuba was like, you can choose the professor whose research you are interested in and you can align your research then. I was like, professors nowadays in AI are changing their directions every 3 years. Professor Liuba told me that "AI is just a tool, AI is not the whole thing, and the hype will pass". I was like, "all the undergrads here are working in AI in a state of panic and anxiety". I asked if it is chill and like they got work life balance. They said of course you can join a club if you want and overall the place is really small and they don't have a lot of students so you can walk up to professors. I said I had been to Concord for a summer camp before and I really enjoyed the place and New England. And I said have a good day.

Chat #2 With Professor Wu

Mainly about research. If I get the official admission, I will likely go. Thanks professor for the time and for advocating to the security committee for me.

Prof: Due to ... (blamed the government), Chinese students need a long security check these days. Very sorry for the inconvenience! WashU is a much better university and he knows professor Chen also doing AI in WashU from USTC, I can contact him to "convert" into a PhD as well.

• What direction will I be working on? Since I will have RA funding, which specific grant or project that will be funding me?

AI for science (I don't want to do it!), also has endowned chair, but I can also do trustworthy learning (professor claimed is "crowded").

I be like, "I didn't study one course in Chemistry and Biology and I know I am bad at it." Professor be like, "back in our times in USTC we need some Chemistry and Biology." Professor be like, "fine, I am just telling you the situation, I am not forcing you down a path you don't like. I am just saying it is more crowded there. You cannot compete with big labs in fundamental research anyway."

• GPU resources

8x H200, A100 (several years ago), shared HPC

• Do I have flexibility for my research? Or is the research strictly defined by the lab's projects?

Due to ... (blamed the government again), NSF/grants are harder, Professor has much less funding than a few years ago. As Professor bought 8x 200 GPUs with some 300k dollars, the money is more tight right now. "AI for science" (claimed is the new direction) can pay get grants. But you can still choose your own direction more or less.

Professor Wu said you will not have time to collaborate with other professors or do flexible things once you get bogged down in a project or research, where you have to produce results in several months and compete with other researchers.

• Do you expect students to publish in their first year, or mostly focused on coursework and paper review?

Directly into research. Professor says you can graduate in 4 years if everything goes well. There are almost no students who did "TA" except Karuna, almost everyone is always an "RA". Most people listed on the lab page graduate in 4-5 years. We got a student from Bangladesh and a student from China coming this year. You might be collaborating with them.

About the USTC Alumni Network

WashU sent me a WeChat group. I went into the group and there were very few people, only one professor. The WashU stat professor Lin Nan is also from USTC and I added his WeChat. (so I guess that was why I got admitted?)

So I realized something, this USTC bachelor will actually stay with me for a while. It's almost like no matter how much I hate my undergrad and how depressed I was, it had already opened some doors for me, literally built high trust and direct pipelines to professors. So most USTC alumnis are like this: slightly awkward, highly literal, but quite fair and unpretentious (although it's a generalization). I can't say this is nepotism or something because similar practices are everywhere, and how in grad school an LOR is worth more than anything. So like I better keep playing this card if I can.

About Finance

As I do detailed finance accounting every month for any amounts greater than 50 RMB, I have to figure out "who pays for what and how much".

While my parents are always comfortable upper middle class in Shanghai, they are extremely stingy with money, relative to their net worth. They like to use money as leverage over me, frequently using gaslighting and emotional guilt to deny me of making my own choices. My parents always operate on the "scarcity mindset". I couldn't wait to be financially independent. Relying on my parents would stop me from reaching true independence and adulthood.

People say society is divided into many classes.

On one hand, I couldn't register myself into the "upper middle class" because all my daily problems are so basic and distinctively "working class". My privileges are near-native English, International travels, and drinking more yogurt everyday, but at the the end of the day I am still trapped in hyper-competitive, meaningless, terminal exams throughout my whole life with constant threats from my parents and schools. Perpetual delayed gratification and "eating bitterness" are supposed to be a working class problems. According to the theory, I was supposed to be privileged in class, but I never got to enjoy the privilege ever in my life.

On the other hand, I could not understand or empathize with the working class. In the working class, money is the most important thing. The theory is that poor people need to prioritize their immediate money, have no margin for error, and it is an absolute blessing for someone to enter a university like USTC. People say how having fun, dating, going to bars, craving culture, and aesthetics are petty, useless, and irrelevant in their lives compared to their immediate survival. But I grew up without being hungry for a single day, there was always disposable income, and now we have 2 estates in Shanghai.

There is just a lot of the cognitive dissonance. If working hard cannot even buy you the basic enjoyment in your life, and you are infantilized and stripped of your agency in the Chinese system, then seriously I have zero incentive to work and live at all, as is the situation if I continue to stay in China. I don't even care if I get richer and all I care about right now is a normal teenage life at 21. How pathetic is it all!

2-year MS cost in the US (out of state)

I do not live lavishly, nor am I suffocating on a budget. In my exchange year, I lived in a separate bedroom or studio and eat around 2 meals a day in restaurants, cafeteria, or the supermarket. I spent at least 80k USD during the exchange year in Berkeley (I took 10 courses total which is over 30k, Berkeley extension fee is 10k, rent is around 20k, and I went to Alaska for around 4k USD, I didn't do detailed accounting back then) and I got around 8k USD (55k RMB) reimbursement from USTC.

I calculated the fee of an MS in the US and it was anywhere from 80k USD to 160k USD, let's say, 500k RMB to 1.2M RMB. The credit hours are anywhere from 1k USD to 2.5k USD. Some universities have a "flat-rate" fee (33k per semester in WashU for full-time students). So the course fees are anywhere from 30k to 100k. In short, it depends on where you are going (New York, New England, California, or a deep red state like Oklahoma) and it depends on the specific school. But you'd be paying 15k-40k a year to the school, and spending 40k-80k USD a year total.

Capitalism likes this, so admission is usually incredibly easy for MS. I got admitted to so many schools. A single school like Northeastern can graduate around 2k CS MS every year. Other schools such as UT Dallas, NYU, ASU, NJIT takes 500-1500 CS MS students I think, mostly International.

How does the university gets money and who funds a PhD? (from their perspective)

Professors get money from NSF, DARPA, or other grants, or money from industry connections. However, university will tax part of that money for itself (let's say, 50%). A prestigious professor receives an endowed chair title and can get money from the interest rate (usually without taxes).

A CS PhD costs a professor 60k-120k USD a year (depending on whether it's a deep red state or a rich blue state). That's around 300k-600k USD in 5 years. This covers the student's stipend, tuition (you take courses mostly for the first 2 years, but then I learned about "phantom tuition") and healthcare insurances. That does not include research budgets such as AWS GPU credits. So the popular labs such as BAIR or Sky in Berkeley are operating like mid-sized tech companies.

Capitalism leaves rich majors (such as CS) to the "market demand", so admission is usually incredibly difficult for CS/AI. There are around 2k total CS PhD graduates a year. The very same schools (Northeastern, USC, ASU) has around 40-80 CS PhD students a year.

• TA vs RA: I think a CS PhD student spends most of the time as an RA, and maybe a few semesters as a TA. This is not like undergrad TAs who work on an hourly rate, though I was never an undergrad TA anyway. Poor majors (such as liberal arts) spend most of the time as a TA on a minimal salary.
  • If you are an RA, the professor pays.
  • If you are a TA, the university pays.
  • If you have a serious medical problem, the insurance company pays.
• However, PhD students usually cannot work more than 20 hours legally a week on campus. A typical TA or RA job is 20 hours. (but obviously you do research for far more than that) So it means you work either job. You always have to do research, while you have to teach if you are a TA.

Tuition and campus life

I think a PhD student takes courses in the first two years like an MS student.

• What if I take a "literature" class? Who pays for it? I don't know. Maybe you have a tuition waiver up to a certain amount and then you have to pay. Maybe they have a flat-rate tuition. Maybe the advisor will stop you from taking any "philosophy" courses. But I probably won't be enrolling in classes because I hate listening to a lecture without discussions and being graded.
• Can I audit? Depends on if the specific professor or instructor is fine with it.
• Can I go to a literature or writing club meeting for 2 hours a week? I think I can if my research is going well and I am publishing papers. But I probably won't be "leading" a club.
• Greek life? No.

Normalized salary

Let's calculate the "normalized salary". I think the tuition counts as your salary if you are taking classes (because otherwise you need to pay to go to classes), while phantom tuitions and healthcare shouldn't count (because you don't need to pay for it with a take-home salary). What is your actual salary compared to the average personal income in the US?

So let's say, in a deep red state

• 45k USD for the first 2 years
• 25k USD for the next 3 years

That's around 160k USD total, so around 30k-35k USD per year. That's just slightly below the average wage in deep red states (around 40k USD per year). You can also work internships in the summer if things are going well. I don't know about the exact number or if I would do an internship, but I think it is more or less around the average wage and basically comfortable.

The "Scheme" of Current AI (Outside of the Absolute Elite Labs)

A PhD in CS/AI is no longer what I thought it should be. Maybe Stats is better honestly.

The "AI for Science" Phenomenon in Academia

Go look at almost any PI's website outside of the "top labs" on CSRankings. Everyone is doing healthcare, biology, chemistry, or medicine. It is not only happening in unranked or R2 schools; it is happening everywhere outside of the top labs. More than half of the professors are in this field, and I think they are doing it not because they like it, but mostly out of desperation to get NSF funds. Even if you look at "networks" or "database" professors, a lot of them are running to it as well. Many professors themselves were originally in databases or OS; then they shifted to NLP as the GPT hype rose, and now they have pivoted to healthcare because they need grants and cannot compete with industry compute. In fact, if you search for recent grants, they are all about this shit.

There is a reproducibility crisis. It doesn't matter if you are at an R2 school, a 150 ranked school, or at a top 20 school doing healthcare; it is probably academic fraud anyway. If you write papers, you need to read papers. If you read papers, you need to know what they are talking about. If you try to understand what they are talking about, you can't. If you try to email the authors, you get no replies, no data, and no source code. Ultimately, I do not actually want to do applied research.

The Reality of a Green Card/"Research Scientist" ("Why do a PhD at all?")

What do I do if I am a mid-GPA student at a school like USTC, who is good at math compared to the general public but has no papers? I am not talented enough to be a literal genius, guarantee to have profound and significant breakthroughs, or lead open-source projects right now. Furthermore, I do not have the financial cushion or network to launch a startup directly.

My goal is to go to the US or a Western country to become a research scientist. If I go to an MS program, it is usually a huge factory churning out a thousand students. I do not want to be a Software Engineer (SWE); there are too many of them, and it is mostly an applied role. So my options feel limited. I can't get into the top 4 PhD programs to achieve this goal. So the best way for me is to get into a mid-tier PhD.

The Speed of Research

To be a researcher in a top lab, you need to go to a top 5 PhD program. To get into a top 5 PhD program, you need to have multiple papers in undergrad. To join labs in undergrad, you need to handle the courses well and have abundant free time. I do not fit this profile from the start, but I do not think I am denied entirely and should become nihilistic.

The LLM hype is literally younger than my backup laptop. By the time I finish my PhD, nobody will care about what I did during my doctorate because the technology will be outdated in a few years anyway. Since PIs don't actually know what they are doing now, their guidance might not matter that much as well. The catch is that I heard online that if you are a PhD student in the US, the school doesn't matter if you have research. But it seems your research also doesn't matter very much if it isn't top-4 PhD level elite and it goes straight into the trashcan after your PhD. So what matters in the end? The "Doctor" title? Your industry networks? Your self-advocacy, presentation and PR?

Chill

Find a chill tenured professor. If you can't work for the professor's grant or their funding dries up, then do a TA and compromise if possible. Forgive the people who are committing fraud. Avoid resentment at all costs.

If you are in a state of terminal anxiety or terror, you do not do good research, and progress grinds to a halt. True research is built on curiosity and passion, not on terror and anxiety. Therefore, you should not sacrifice your well-being for marginal research, a marginal GPA increase, or marginal anxiety and terror. Do not be scared of other people churning out papers or doing whatever else. Do not panic when someone else beats you. Remember: capitalism is essentially broken, detached from the human soul, and not a true reflection of human value. Even if you aren't making as much as others do, an AI researcher in the current economy is already running circles around most professions. Have a low ego, but maintain your dignity. Ultimately, starting in my early 20s, I want to build a 50+ year career.

What to Optimize For? And Where Do I Go in the Future?

Health (Mental Health, Physical Health)

Have fun, eat good food, stop being anxious and sleep well, enjoy my youth, participate in sports and retreats, and hang out with beautiful people.

The great delayed gratification lie I was sold on the first day of middle school has turned into perpetual delayed gratification. They say middle school is busy, so you have to study now. Then high school. Then university. Then a PhD. Then a corporate grind. In January you have finals. In February you have projects. In March you are busy. In April you are writing a thesis. In May you have midterms. In June you have finals. This lie must end. There is nothing at the end of it but nihilism and an existential crisis. Since I already lost so much time to middle school, high school, and my undergrad, there is no way to pay it back. But now, after grieving for those lost teen years, I need to make sure it does not happen again. We live in a highly developed society. This means when you are in a deep depression, anxiety, or having severe disillusions, or where your basic health and performance is threatened, the most important thing is no longer trying harder, but to actively slow down, stop chasing the fame, and cure your mental health before you do anything else.

Soft Skills

An awkward, introverted person gets heavily penalized in the modern capitalist economy. Therefore, you must be extroverted, proactive, and advocating for yourself.

Also learn how to present and communicate with people outside of your subject. Do not look down on or resent people outside of the field, and do not harbor an elitist complex. Be friends and have empathy for non-tech people as well. Start a social media channel and organize social events. This isn't endless partying, drinking, or chaotic behavior. This is simply about learning how to network, market yourself, and communicate effectively.

Future

A PhD opens the door for me to apply to PostDocs or "Research Affiliate" in better universities. As I learned, a PostDoc is much easier to enter than a PhD and it is great for networking. An unpaid "Research Affiliate" at MIT can have very few requirements and it can be a brilliant PR for your startup or in non-elite labs. I have zero intentions of entering the Academia. I need to network heavily. As I am new to the US, I am starting fresh and I do not know many people who is working at Google or Amazon. Having a friend who can help you is better than having no friends at all.

I do not necessarily need to work at Anthropic or Google. There are many lesser-known labs (like AI21, Cohere, or Nebius), or I could also just join a startup. If I have some money and live comfortably, I can become a founder or pivot to any field I like. Only after the PhD do you truly hit the road.

It appears that a lot of second or third tier PhDs went to SWE roles in FAANG. It appears that the IIT clan is deeply entrenched into the middle and upper positions at FAANG, and they play the corporate politics much better than passive introverted Chinese guys. Is it a good idea to change my last name to "Singh", start playing cricket and quoting Tagore? Also, if you join FAANG, you would be given a censored laptop (I heard where if you do not use the laptop, HR will fire you, if you use it to writing anything, it would be analyzed by an ML algorithm, and you can't commit to your personal Github anymore). Once your value gets reduced to rigid metrics (L4, L5, L6, L7) instead of your creative personality and your communication skills, you know you are in big trouble, and I would probably fail as miserable as I did in Gaokao and USTC GPA. So perhaps I won't go to FAANG. Honestly, I do not know what to do, and it's best at this time to get a dose of fatalism and humanism from late Soviet movies.

TLDR

• Play the basic conventional game: Get the "Doctor in Computer Science," secure a Green Card, and build solid basic coding skills.
• Prioritize health and socializing: Protect your physical and mental health, develop soft skills, and never allow yourself to become isolated, socially stunted, or delay dating infinitely.

Logistics in the US

Pre-Arrivial

• I-20
• I-901

Actually, I still have my F1 visa from the Berkeley exchange. I still have around 1.5 years valid time, so I am not applying for a new visa.

Post Arrival

• Arrive at a hotel/airbnb for a few days, University Check-In, Student ID,
• Bank card (use Credit Card)
• Rent, Wifi (per last time: Furmax Office Chair $44, Squatty Potty $27, ZINUS 6 Inch Memory Foam Mattress $106, Sleep Philosophy Memory Foam Topper 1.5 Inch $40, CubiCubi Computer Desk $49, ZINUS 14 inch Metal Bed Frame $44)
• Mobile number
• Get SSN

Non-urgent

• State ID
• Learn driving, get driver's licenses

Some Other Things

• Last time I went on exchange for a year and I didn't have the State ID or SSN
• Mobile number, mobile data, and Wifi was a big headache last time. First I used ATT for half a year with some other students, then they went home, and I couldn't figure out how to continue the plan. I went to ATT stores and they refused to help me. So I canceled the plan and I ordered a Mint Sim from Amazon. In the second I rented an apartment and they didn't have Wifi, and I didn't install a Wifi, so I used Mint Mobile data all the time. I think I bought Mint's fake "unlimited" plan, but it was only 40 GB at high speed. I would frequently spend 100-200 dollars a month total very infuriatingly. (solution: get home wifi like Home Internet or Cable Self-Install. For mobile data, use ? plan)
• Bank card was another headache for me last time. I was paranoid so I unlocked the Citi debit card when I wanted to buy something and then locked it immediately afterwards (solution: Credit Card)

Salary

Ok, turned out that my stipend is around 2500 dollars a month before taxes. I am so happy! So I searched for a while and Dr. Wu's lab is in the JB Hunt Building. (I am not 100% sure if I will be working there though).

Campus Layout

North of the university are the greek life houses. West side of the campus is the football stadium, down the hill. East side of the campus are the bars. South side of the campus is the high school. The academic buildings are in the middle. Literally I heard the football stadium opens for 6 times a year and you can't go in to run. The other track playground isn't for casual running either. Well this is quite literally Capitalism.

Arkansas sent me an email offering on-campus housing for $750-$800. But turned out there were only around 40 beds in total for graduate students. So I gave up on that thought. So you either live in a private housing company, or you find a single home off campus.

Clubs

I messaged some people on LinkedIn in the "Main Hill Media". I said I want to learn from them and I am interested in media, content creation, I have a YouTube and TikTok channel. They said they can help me connect with the club. But it appears that there is a high overlap between the media clubs and greek life, which seems highly exclusive and pretentious, so I don't know if I would want to join them. I messaged "The Movement Company" on Instagram, and I asked if a man can join the club. They said yes, "there was a man last year". And it turned out they are quite professional and not a chill hip-hop club. By the way there is also a Pom-pom club, which is very funny and obviously not for men. I have almost never seen such things in my life. So I looked at some different more chill dancing clubs. The Hilltop and Swing dance clubs are like "Tuesday 7-8 pm" or "Friday 6-8 pm" and all beginners welcome, so 1-2 hours a week, which seems very appealing.

I got into Discord student hub once I got my email. But Discord is a terrible app because it is semi-anonymous. Anyway, Discord does not seem very popular there anyway, there were mostly just EECS or related communities in the server.

Obviously you don't want to join 10 clubs and then quickly drop out. As long as the PhD is going stable, I am going to check out some chill clubs that hangs out like once a week. As I am going to be stuck in Arkansas for a long time like 4-5 years if I don't get fired by the professor. The "perpetual delayed gratification" better fuck off. So if I join 3-4 clubs, that's only around 6 hours a week.

• Creative Writing: https://hogsync.uark.edu/cwc/home/
• Main Hill Media: https://www.instagram.com/mainhillmedia/
• Eurasian Club: https://www.instagram.com/uark_russian/
• Mexican-American Student Association: https://www.instagram.com/uark_mxsa/
• Central American Student Alliance: https://www.instagram.com/uarkcasa/
• Swing Dance: https://www.instagram.com/uarkswing/
• Ballroom Dance Club: https://www.instagram.com/uofaballroom/
• Hilltop Country Dance Club: https://www.instagram.com/hilltop.twosteppers/
• Mental Health Awareness Organization: https://www.instagram.com/_mhao_uark/
• Book Club: https://www.instagram.com/razorbookclub/
• Bridge at Arkansas: https://www.instagram.com/bridgearkansas/
• Film Appreciation Forum: https://www.instagram.com/uarkfaf/
• UATV: https://www.instagram.com/uatvnews/

Previous Experiences at Cal

Recalling some socializing experiences in Cal. I was 17 by then.

I quickly joined the Discord student hub, I posted on Reddit about being excited to be there, and I joined the Chinese student WeChat group.

However, I walked straight into 2 massive problems. When I first went to Cal, I still had to do take finals in China remotely (thanks to the covid policies back home postponing finals till February). I was in concurrent enrollment, which means you are placed in the lowest priority for course selection, and EECS makes it worse. You can only be sure of what classes you are taking at around the third week.

I went to a business club or something, the first time people met in a large building. And when I went in there it was insanely loud and everyone was talking to everyone, like, 200 people in that building. So I left.

Then I went to a running club. Even the cal running club was very fast and I couldn't keep up, they do 65-70 second laps for several laps.

Then I went to OCF, OCF is more chill and probably the only tech club without any barriers, and people are actually passionate, but there isn't anything to talk to if you don't have a tech problem they can help you with.

Then there's a stat club, I went for a coffee chat with a member. They say they teach full-stack. They need 2 rounds of interviews. I was like, ok, bye.

There's a hiking club. I went there but it was some guys walking on a rope between trees in the first meeting. I exchanged Instagram with someone, but I don't think people care. So I left.

Then I went somewhere at night in north Berkeley, and it was another kind of meetup or something. It was so dark there. Finally I arrived and found some people but the foods were gone and they were leaving.

I went to the YA and creative writing decal. It's really cool, but I couldn't sign up for the class for 3 weeks and ultimately left. And before I failed I heavily prioritized CS. I should have stayed longer to hang around though.

I had a partner for the AI course, he came to my apartment and we worked on the first project together, but I ended up dropping the course.

Then the remote finals hit (actually I did ok in the finals compared to the failures later), my energies crashed, and I genuinely got lost in a big school. And I was also under heavy pressure to grind CS. And obviously I didn't want to hang out with Chinese students on WeChat. And I never had the energy during the year.

In the second semester I only went to the ML club introduction, and, as expected, they rejected me. I enrolled in 4 courses well beyond my capacity. And I was walking around a lot, taking the Bart to a station like Fremont, Emeryville, Orlando, Lafayette, then walking for 1-2 hours around, and taking the bart back. Or I ran down the city to the shore and Albany a lot, since it's downhill, and just running there and back. I had a lot of lonely coffee or cookies in Moffitt, not the place to strike up any conversation with strangers. You go in and everywhere there's a person with a laptop.

I even went to the Berkeley high school several times. I was the same age 17-18 back then. Once they were playing a basketball game and people were cheering, and I sat there among students. Once or twice they played soccer. I went there once in the morning and I stayed half a day mostly wandering around the campus and in the library. But I didn't talk to anyone though.

I lived in shared bedroom house with 5 housemates at the start. One roommate, female, with her boyfriend most of the time, just "polite hi". Another roommate, male, stuck in his room gaming and I don't know if he ever goes out. Another roommate, female, from UK, working in Lawrence labs, always with her mom and very closed. Another roommate, male, seen once like in half a year. Then at the second semester I lived in a studio at north Berkeley.

The whole point is that I did not meaningfully put myself into the American society. I did not integrate and feel that I belong.

About "Parties" and How to "Belong"

Here are the reasons (and realities) why I do need a social life.

• People are extremely avoidant here and glued to their screens. You talk to someone, and they constantly have awkward introvert breakdowns. Ok, you can talk to other people about gaming but I do not do that. Everyone uses the "busy studying" excuse whether they are actually studying or not. It is extremely difficult to drag someone out of their dorms. Nearly all of my dormmates spend most of their times indoors.
• There is no place to cook in the dorms. If you live off-campus, no one is coming to your rented apartment. There are simply no parties here.
• Ok, I stopped using Tencent QQ in 4 years ago, so there was literally nothing left to talk with people, and I could no longer follow the campus clubs anymore. The QQ chats are flooded with useless anonymous shit usually.
• If you people-watch for a while, you began to see exactly one person: a male student with glasses, awkward, looking at their phone, wearing the most utilitarian clothes. They may be tall, short, fat, thin, have different face shapes, but the archetype applies for 80% of people.

Honestly, is it 100% impossible to build a social life in Hefei? No, but the friction is simply too high, and you need to constantly convince people that they give up the excuse of studying. I invited 10 people and nobody wanted to go to the park and ferris wheel with me. And in the end you get an all male dinner where you have nothing to do anyway, like the dorm dinners I had. I talk to woman exactly once every several months. You can try to infiltrate the nearby universities, but it just takes too much unnecessary work, cultural barriers, and I was constantly academically struggling anyway.

I heard that some American parties filter for male ratios, so if I show up there, they won't let me in. Ok. Capitalism is capitalism, and there is always a way to bypass some barriers if you put in enough money. But I am not doing that obviously. I am a highly outdoor person. I like city walking (and I walk or cycle 10-15 km once or twice every week), lakes, bridges, parks, beaches. I also like wandering around in libraries, campuses, and museums. I do not like gyms, indoor sports, bars, nightclubs, anime, gaming, board games, and concerts. So how can we go to a party? Can we host a party? Can we "belong" and connect with people without hosting parties?

Anyway, if I have time I can try to host a dinner party in Arkansas. Ok, first of all, just to clarify, I eat almost anything. I am not picky about food. Actually I like eating American food and Mexican food more than Chinese food. But now we are talking about making it tasty. My favorite Chinese dishes: Mung bean soup, sweet and sour pork ribs (boneless), soup dumplings (xiaolongbao), noodles with minced pork, gyudon (Japanese), stir-fried tomato and egg, scallion pancakes (must be thin). I don't like bland, heavy carbs like scallion noodles, white rice, or thick pancakes that fill you up with one taste. I do not like hotpots, dumplings, heavy salty dishes, or sticky meat that gets stuck in your teeth (my teeth aren't bad).

I think we should just chill, and if at some point I am going to get expelled, all the socializing gets thrown out of the window all over again. Seriously try to do it one step at a time and first just join clubs regularly for around 5 hours a week.

Navigating America: Capitalism and Law

America is fundamentally build on two things: capitalism and law. It's just the two things played over and over again.

Capitalism means the "market" primarily dictates how things work, it's easy when you don't cost them money, but otherwise you must prove that you are worth their investment. Law is a basic set of rules to enforce the contracts and keep the society functioning, and everything else relies on you to argue aggressively in a debate.

In education, as long as you relentlessly argue for yourself, no matter whether you deserve it or not, (condition 1), and you are not costing them money, either bring in money or just don't require funding (condition 2),then the doors are wide open. The front door (MIT or Stanford PhD) is heavily guarded because they give you money, but almost everywhere else are accessible (CC transfer to UCs, exchange students and extension programs, summer programs, cash cow MS, postdocs, visiting reseachers/scholars, unpaid research scientists). When you apply for the visa, only two conditions matter, show them a 1 million RMB check and tell them a solid job is waiting back home.

In socializing, Law is about respecting other people's personal boundaries. Capitalism means being direct, unapologetic and actively doing what you want, such as joining a niche club, hosting a party, or casually talking to someone. Chinese mainstream socializing does not have a clear set of rules, nor is it direct - it's very unchill, built on hierarchies, face, harmony, and sometimes crosses personal boundaries.

While Chinese are externally polite and avoid confrontations, they are heavily transactional in their personal relationships and hobbies and incredibly judgemental in private. In the US, people are cold and transactional in public, but many Americans are part of some "useless" collectives (football, religions, greek life, diaspora communities) in private. Once your English crosses a threshold and you follow the "Law", you don't need to care about American culture references or the news.

April and May turned out to be a long awaited period of peace for me. After years spent in high anxiety and terror, I finally get to enjoy myself for a while, though I don't know how long it will last. Historically for me, these periods are usually very short. Last time was still 3 years ago in May in Berkeley, after the final exam of the first semester, before the summer semester started and I messed up. Then the time before that was just after the freshman year, a relatively short period before zero COVID hit too hard. Then the time before that, I was still somewhere in middle school. Each time started with late spring and summer, and ended as the harsh autumn came along. Or sometimes, like the summer spent in Hong Kong, it simply never came. I went to McDonalds in HKUST late at night, watching people party, counting the security guards, feeling my weight surging, and afraid to look at my grades all summer. I couldn't look at it, I did not have the mental courage to accept myself, so I hid until the start of the semester, as I hid from the teachers, hid from the sun and stayed up until I drowned in sleep in the morning, trying a little too hard. And now we are calm when we accept ourselves, and we have fun with our lingering youth.