My class/work schedule

I finally figured out my schedule for the new semester! So far it seems to be more intense than all my other semesters at Duke and a lot more intense than in Beijing. But as my past summer job taught me, the real world seems to demand more work from people. I can no longer just work 5 hours a day and have so many long meals and chill sessions in between. I need to be responsible and try my best.

This past week, I made two schedule changes that I'm glad for. I dropped this BS "American science policy" class which I originally chose to satisfy the annoying STS (Science Technology and Society) requirement. This class was going to take 3 hours every Monday evening and the class discussions seem so slow and boring. I also dropped computational systems biology, which was going to be way too hard, considering that I have no background in biology and we were reading 2-6 current research papers a week with the intention of gathering ideas for our original research in this budding subject. I replaced the science policy class with an independent study with Vincent Conitzer, which I needed for my CSURF fellowship; I replaced systems biology with an easy but required class for my compsci major. Hopefully I won't have to go to this class so I would have more time for research and have free time for myself. I'm also hoping to skip most of my computational complexity lectures, because the professor teaches in such a slow, convoluted and unclear way. Worst of all, he changed the Duke convention of 2.5 hours of class a week to 6 hours per week! I hope to learn more efficiently by reading the notes he post, which contrary to his lectures are clear, concise and very informative. However, I don't want to offend him either because he is well-known in the field and I might need to ask him to write me a recommendation letter for grad school.

My other classes include data mining, which seems interesting and the professor is very good. He's a laid-back, Chinese-born Stanford PhD with the same accent as me (I want to go to Stanford too). I'm also taking a high-frequency financial econometrics seminar co-taught by Tim Bollerslev, whose GARCH model I had to implement during my past summer internship. He seems to be one of the most famous econ professors at Duke and the class offers free lunch every time! My last class is basketball, during which we learn some basic skills, do drills, and play at least half an hour of full court basketball each time. I wanted to get better in basketball for a long time and this seems to be the perfect way to actually accomplish that.

The thing that I really want to focus on this semester is my research. I'm working with Vincent Conitzer under the CSURF fellowship and I'm paid $15 an hour to do research with my advisor for the last 2 years--Kamesh Munagala. During sophomore year, I did bare minimum to get by in my weekly meetings with Dr. Munagala, and didn't really come up with anything. Now that I've decided to go to grad school, this leeching must stop and I must be more serious. After all, this is what I see myself doing after graduation. The topic I'm working on with Dr. Munagala--finding better solution concepts for dynamic games--seem very relevant and interesting. I still need to decide my CSURF topic with Dr. Conitzer.

Here is my schedule for this semester. Hopefully classes and work won't consume me this semester and I can still have time for friends...