Notes on my first quarter at UW

I am writing this as my finals grade for a linguistics course just dropped and made me speechless for a good half hour. I realized I just completed my first quarter at UW. As someone who left a cushy tech job (with an exponential growth curve) back in India for my Master's, I felt it was important for me to write everything down. I wanted to be grateful about the things that worked for me, rant about those that didn't, and simmer in deep thought about everything in between.

What didn't work for me

There isn't a lot for me to put into the basket of "achievements" from this quarter. I was briefly interested in pursuing AI Safety and I was rejected from all programs I applied to - MATS, SPAR, CHAI summer 2026 internship.

I knew what the job market looked like before making a decision to come here for a Master's. I am very pragmatic that way. I have very practical notions of how this stint is going to work out for me. I did believe that a Master's would bring me much closer to a Research Engineer job in some of the most exciting places on the West Coast. I am beginning to lose faith in my plans.

Research is tough. Finding a research advisor is tougher. Almost all of the faculty at UW I have reached out to, didn't have the capacity to advise me for a thesis. This was heartbreaking. UW has a thriving NLP scene. It is what attracted me to this place. However, everything is not as it seems. Most NLP faculty are operating on thin ice. Ph.D. students are in a similar boat. They are overstretched between performing experiments, attending conferences, and looking for jobs. There is hardly any time to collaborate with other graduate students and faculty members. This is not how I imagined doing research at a top-CS school to be like. A faculty member from CMU responded to me with the below email when I reached out to him for summer research opportunities -

Thank you for reaching out! I regularly host several interns, but I am a little bit at capacity at the moment. What would be the main reason for reaching out from UW, which also has a very strong NLP group?

Needless to say, I had strong opinions about my answer.

I assumed it would be easier to seek research opportunities elsewhere in academia. I am afraid it's quite convoluted. Most programs within academic institutions intended to promote research opportunities are designed either for undergraduates (URoP programs) or Ph.D. students (visiting scholar programs). It's a strange technicality that a Master's student is considered to have "significantly" less research experience than a Ph.D. student, but the hiring bar is considerably higher as opposed to an undergraduate. I found it difficult to place myself in this academic hierarchy.

I think my biggest struggle has been finding research internships in the industry. All the big boy labs have suddenly pivoted to hiring "only Ph.D. students" for research internships. It was a rude shock. I tend to generally avoid hyperbole and I am not overstating when I say that more than 90% of the research roles in tech are reserved for Ph.D. students (at the time of writing this, there are 140 open internships at Meta and 138 are for Ph.D. students). This is a very weird statistic tbh. In the industry, MS and BS students are largely open to apply to SWE and MLE roles and it is hard to get into research engineering roles at the hottest startups (Note that it is hard, not impossible. There are exceptions).

I am still reaching out to more people within academia. I hope I get to shadow wonderful mentors. I am particularly interested in pivoting to RL these days. I am super close to everything exciting that's happening in Seattle, yet I find myself far enough to not being able to be a part of it. It's frustrating. It's also not fun at all.

This brings me to the old adage in computer science - "How am I supposed to gather research experience for an internship that is supposed to give me the necessary research experience?".

Miscellaneous

People around me have been saying that it gets easy once you make friends. I have always prided myself on being able to make strong friendships wherever I go in my adulthood. I did it in Bangalore. I did it in Delhi NCR. How hard could Seattle be?

Well, it isn't easy, and the reason isn't that simple. It takes a lot of factors into account in being able to make meaningful connections in a new city. I could start with my flatmates. Then begin talking to their friends. I could spend time in study groups with my batch mates. I could also attend clubs and societies on campus. The reality is complex. I have tried most of these outlets, and I haven't found like-minded people yet. It's turning out hard to find commonalities to build a solid ground. Plus, UW campus is surprisingly low on energy. There just aren't enough social scenes happening!

I have also decided on expanding my options for where I want to end up after my Master's. I don't want to put a finger on it, but I do need to study probability theory way more than I have.

I am routinely inspired by two of the most dramatic underdog performances in badminton over this decade - from the Singaporean Loh Kean Yew in the World Championships 2021 and by the Canadian Victor Lai at the World Championships 2025. They got one chance at rewriting history, and they simply grabbed it. I am hopeful that my efforts will lead me to my one big chance, though I have learned to keep expectations at bay and keep my options open.