A Failure Resume
Success isn't linear. Most progress is one step back, two steps forward. I've had a lot of achievements over the past few years, but this isn't the place for that.
It makes my successes better, but more importantly, it paints a realistic picture of the things I've done. It reminds me that I've worked hard for the things I care about, and motivates me to keep doing so.
I copied the idea from Jacky Zhao.
2025
- Rejected from an undergrad TA position (again)
- Rejected from Stanford MS CS
2024
- Other researchers beat me to my project ideas, twice
- Spent an entire quarter on a research project that ended in a negative result
- Still learned a lot! Distributed training, ViTs, experiment design, etc.
- Negative results are still important in science, so depending on how you look at this, it isn't a failure
- Rejected from an undergrad TA position in the CS department for Spring 2024 (even after serving for 2 consecutive quarters)
- Probably not a reflection of my abilities—lots of excellent students I know also didn't get a returning offer
- Update, Fall 2024: Rejected again
- Update, Winter 2025: Got the position again!
- Rejected from 3/3 NSF REUs
- Rejected from ~400 internship applications
- This year's search ended in success, so it technically doesn't belong here. I'm leaving it to remind myself how long it can take to see results.
2023
- Rejected (placed low on waitlist) by ERSP
- Ended up finding a ML research lab and contributing to a RL project anyway, so the above wasn't that big of a deal.
- Paper rejected from NeurIPS 2023
- Ended up getting accepted to the RSS 2024 TaskSpec Workshop (almost a year later!)
- Rejected from an undergrad TA position in the CS department (again)
- Accepted the 3rd time around for Fall 2023! It's been great
- Gave up on joining a UCSB quantum computing lab and an NLP lab
- Strategically giving up is not easy. I lost interest in theoretical quantum computing (a la error-correction algorithms) and didn't see a good fit in that NLP lab. In this case, the strategy worked well.
2022
- Rejected by 96/96 internship applications
- Rejected from MIT (and all my other top-choice universities)
- This was particularly disappointing because SSP (an astrophysics program I attended) has abnormally high rates (~20-30%) of alumni who attend there. Learned that hard work doesn't guarantee you'll achieve a specific goal; many things are simply outside your control.
- Rejected from the Atlas Fellowship
- Rejected from an undergrad TA position in the CS department