I know that I know - because I lived it
My mid-term reflection on the meta-learning experiment
Many people have asked me how my meta-learning experiment has been going since I unenrolled from Berkeley 8 weeks ago. I would tell them it’s great and growthful, but I know that no summary can serve this experience justice.
I can’t capture all the details in this reflection. In fact, I can’t even paint a full picture in my head. Lots of subtle changes in me are potentially the beginnings of more visible long-term transformations. For the first time, I am my own boss. I made every decision for myself: from what to learn to how to learn it; from when to push myself to when to stop pushing. For the first time, I felt truly free and experienced the anxiety that comes with self-agency. I realized the importance of discipline, the power of obsession, and the necessity of supporting communities — all on a new dimension.
My most important takeaway so far has to do with self-representation — what I’ve been and am still struggling with. I am now one step closer to truly believing that I do anything if I put my mind to it. This belief is no longer an empty blood-pumping slogan repeated by teachers, coaches, and parents. It has become a self-message that is grounded in my lived experience, so concrete that I cannot dissuade or forget. I am still scared and I still have loads of self-doubt and shut myself off. But I am more aware and more rational. When I am sitting with my thoughts alone, I know that if I really want something, I can and will go the distance.
Here’s an overview of what I accomplished over the last 8 weeks:
In 10 days, I learned Figma from zero, created 2 pixel-perfect replication of Notion’s interfaces, and redesigned Notion mobile to improve the note-taking experience
Over 2 weeks, I read hundreds of pages of philosophy (Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche, At the Existentialism Cafe by Bakewell) and formed my independent thoughts around existentialism
In 4 weeks, I dived into ML and
Implemented minSkLearn with foundational ML algorithms
Re-implemented Andrej Karpathy’s Micrograd from scratch, and 1/3 through the re-implementation of makemore (a character-level language model)
Dabbled projects with Stable Diffusion
Fine-tuned Stable Diffusion with Dreambooth
Hacked on a blog illustration generator using GPT3 and Stable Diffusion APIs
Finished 5.5 out of 9 lectures of the Practical Deep Learning for Coders course by Fast AI
Re-implemented neural net basics, trained CNNs, fine-tuned language models in a series of colab
Worked on my first Kaggle competition
Published a Chinese vs. Korean hot pot classifier using Hugging Face Gradio
I don’t feel proud (because I am a bloody perfectionist who always maintains a self-expectation just beyond reach lol), but I should. Amy on day 1 of the meta-learning experiment never thought she could have gone this far as an autodidact. I thought only artsy kids would be good at design, and Figma is some complicated, scary tool to learn. I thought that ML requires a math foundation that I will never have, and I thought that if I didn’t do research in college, I will never have the technical muscles required to understand ML models.
I also didn’t expect that my struggles were going to be more psychological than technical. Creating my own schedule means there’s no definitive end to things. Some days, I feel like no progress is enough progress and I feel ashamed of not sitting in front of my computer for every waking hour of the day. Self-evaluation becomes very difficult due to the lack of benchmarks. Because I don’t have predefined midterms or deadlines, it’s always hard to tell how well I am doing or how far I’ve gone. Although I should feel good when I accomplish my own goals, it’s not easy to trust my goals in the first place. More often than not, I wonder whether my milestones are reasonable, whether I’m making the best out of my gap semester, or if I am actually wasting my time. I still struggle with the fact that nobody is there to give me the confirmation that “you’re on the right track, just keep going.”
Agency comes with lots of anxiety. At any moment, I feel like there are 10 ways for me to challenge the rate at which I am making progress, my learning methodology, the direction I’m going… you name it. Sometimes, I miss being told what to do so that I don’t have to choose. Agency also comes with complexity. I see dozens of ways to learn every subject of interest, but I must make decisions and take the consequences of my every action — either that be the loneliness of the grind or the self-disappointment of giving up on my plans. On a bad day when I’m stuck and unable to create, I can no longer just walk away because I chose to do what I did.
As I gain agency over myself, I start to face more and more complex problems. Am I ready for this? I am wrestling with the “can I do it” type of question again, like I always do. There’s a whole dimension of things that I used to think I can never accomplish when I am totally capable. But now, I learned that I am more capable than what I give myself credit for. Now, I can at least confidently call some of my limiting beliefs bullshit. Now I know that there’s no gatekeeping for knowledge — most often, all one needs is confidence and grit.
I know that I know this because I lived it.
thanks for this - always enjoy reading your updates. rock on.
It's cool that you are taking the time to explore your interests.
I like how you have been applying what you have learned through these various projects.
I personally would not recommend delving too much into any one rabbit hole e.g. math for ML.
While it is nice to know, it's not a must for industry or a requirement for practical application.
Take for example sailing - even before people understand the physics of sailing e.g. buoyancy, people were still successfully sailing across continents.
If you are feeling stuck, it might be helpful to find mentors, especially those outside of your college.
They may help in providing perspective, especially on how to turn perceived failures into takeaways.
Good luck on your journey!