Self Studying the MIT Applied Math Curriculum

smallstep:

I’m a Master’s student at Harvard and Georgia Tech studying Machine Learning and Computational Biology. I’m also a research assistant in a few labs, and my work spans Applied Math, Theoretical Neuroscience, and Machine Learning. Previously, I helped start an ML startup. I’m planning on applying to PhD programs this fall!

My journey into Machine Learning has been fairly non traditional, I studied mostly biology and cognitive science in my undergraduate career at UCSD and my internships were always in Product Management. I taught myself to code, mostly application development for web and mobile, and slowly started to see parallels between Information Science and Biology, and was fascinated by Neural Networks. This fascination led me to apply for graduate programs in CS and Biology, and I miraculously was accepted! So, with luck and momentum going my way, I dove deep into deep learning research and taught myself whatever mathematical preliminaries were necessary to make sense of the literature.