Some thoughts about the first year of grad school
As I’m finishing my first year and starting my second, I thought it would be nice to pause and write some words, becasue time has gone by at an incredibly fast pace.
Fall 2025
Meeting Mahdi Soltanolkotabi was so cool! Having all my courses taught by him in my first semester is something I’ll always remember with joy and gratitude. He is so funny and knowledgeable. I loved how he taught us emphasizing the style of Emmanuel Candes and his approach to research, based on having complaints in order to get constructive criticism and push the boundaries of science. He made so many jokes I kept laughing all his classes. The kind of jokes that nobody laughs, but I literally had to bite my tongue to control my laugh. Comments like ‘you know there’s this other school in LA…’ Or making jokes about drinking a shot every time the screen projector did not work (which happened quite often). I also enjoy how he referes to everyone as a friend. Whenever a classmate made a question, things like ‘Oh, your friend just made a good question…’. His sense of humor is just amazing. I enjoyed how he emphasized the power and beauty of simple math for proving meaningful theorems. He did an amazing job at demystifying things like KKT conditions and the Lagrange multiplier method, which are typically done in a recepie fashion. It was nice to see what is really happening behind the scenes.
Spring 2026
Taking a class with Stephen Tu has also been a great pleasure. I couldn’t follow many parts of the course due to my non-controls backgound, but it was good to learn about what system identification is, and getting some idea of what is optimal control about. I was always in awe by how sharp his mathematical reasonsing is, I’ve never seen someone with so much depth and breadth in so many topics. Typically breadth and depth trade-off each other, but not with Stephen. He had insights ranging from statistics to optimization, dynamical systems, LLMs, robotics, or pretty much any other CS-related topic. He always had something thoughtful to say, yet he always remained humble and curious to learn. That same semester I also took mixed-integer optimization with Bistra Dilkina and Andres Gomez. I really enjoyed that class as well, they are very nice professors. I was impressed by the fact that there’s an entire research field dedicated to a single algorihtm, in this case the Branch and Bound algorithm. Maybe that’s a dramatic claim, but maybe this also holds for things like conformal prediction or gradient descent, like literally simple algorithms that have established entire research fields, which is crazy to think about.