Autumn 2024 Reflection: Breaking Limits

My Autumn 2024 Transcript

I've always had a strange relationship to grades. On one hand, I believe that the learning is more important than the grade. I know that education is not reducible to a single numerical score, and always strive to learn something new from every class regardless of what grade I receive. On the other hand, I've always been pretty good (but not perfect) at getting good grades. I know that there is at least some correlation between grades and understanding, and I want to know that I gave my very best to a class. If I get a less-than-full score, I want to know that it wasn't from a lack of trying. All this is to say, somewhat anti-climactically, that grades mean something to me that's hard to quantify--somewhere in between nothing and everything.

Going into senior year, I had received straight 4.0-s for the entirety of my junior year, but there was also one limit that I had never managed to break: getting 4.0's in a quarter with more than 16 credits. In three previous quarters, I had attempted 17 credits, but always come up short in exactly one class in each quarter, receiving a 3.8 or a 3.9. I knew that Autumn 2024, the first quarter of my senior year, was going to be a tough one. I had to take 2 400-level philosophy classes and 1 graduate-level CS class, conduct a computer science research project, and lead the undergraduate philosophy journal, on top of applying to internships. Of course, I also took some precautions--taking a pause on my research for the Center for Human Rights and prioritizing my coursework over my other activities, for example--but it was still going to be a daunting quarter.

Autumn 2024 was quite literally my hardest quarter yet, but I made it through while breaking so many limits of what I thought I was capable of. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to list some of the accomplishments I made this quarter, many of which turned into other reflections:

• I completed the user interviews and coding for my Agonistic Image Generation research paper, which was later accepted to the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.

• I wrote the first draft of my paper on African conceptions of personhood that was later awarded first prize by the Cornell University undergraduate philosophy journal.

• I led The Garden of Ideas through the first part of publishing our Autumn 2024 issue.

• I applied for and accepted a data engineering internship with USAFacts.

• I completed a class project for Deep Learning exploring the efficacy of different techniques for machine unlearning on vision models.

• I wrote two essays for Philosophy of AI that I'm deeply proud of: one of them about the relationship between disinformation and agonistic democracy, and another of them a critique of existential risk rhetoric around AI. I've continued to engage with the philosophical concepts from these essays in other classes like CSE 581 (Computer Ethics) and even PHIL 514 (Philosophy of Policing).

• And I did all this while completing 18 credits of coursework with a straight 4.0!!! Like I said above, grades don't mean everything, but they certainly reflected the amount of hard work that I put into this quarter.

At the same time, I can't help but feel conflicted about this quarter, in part because 4 of my 18 credits came from undergraduate research, which I retroactively added with the help of my advisor towards the end of the quarter. That sometimes makes me feel like I didn't "really" complete 18 credits of coursework, but really only completed 14 credits with 4 "fake" credits tacked on. Listing out my accomplishments from the quarter like I did above, however, has helped remind me that perhaps the 4.0 is the least important of all my achievements from Autumn 2024. As I take more advanced coursework and advance in my college career, the most important learning will increasingly take place outside of class, and will increasingly fail to be captured by grades.

Another important caveat to add: I'm both impressed and scared by how hard I worked this quarter. To get all these accomplishments done while maintaining a 4.0, I certainly had to sacrifice sleep, time with friends, and my service activities. After completing the quarter, I took a much-deserved vacation with my family to California and realized that the workload I took on that quarter was certainly not sustainable. I can look back on this quarter and be incredibly proud of what I accomplished, but perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from this quarter is that I also need to learn when to say no (something I continue to struggle with doing).