blog

updates ripped from my main website

xAI hackathon

December 8th, 2025 — Palo Alto, CA

A couple weeks back, I was reached out to by some recruiters at xAI regarding a hackathon that they had been planning for a while. I thought it would be a great opportunity to meet some new people and agreed. I was right! Over the course of the 24 hours, I worked with two new friends from Citadel and Citadel Securities to create an insights & analysis tool for prediction markets. It allowed users to gain a deep understanding of a selected market, facilitating smarter trading, and even had an auto-trader feature. As part of the event, I was also one of the few selected to interview for full time roles at xAI. Apart from the hackathon, I spent the trip with a friend in the Bay Area who showed me the wonderful wonders of California (namely, Din Tai Fung and In-N-Out).

fall break

November 22, 2025 — Chicago, IL

After quite some time in Urbana, I finally got my first long(ish) break of the semester. I’ll be home for about ten days enjoying some home cooked meals & the company of my hometown friends, and since it’s been some time since my last update, I thought I’d recap some things. This semester, I:

• Was invited to the HRT Dinner at Orinoco
• Presented my research in Poker Theory in Chicago
• Interviewed at many companies (Jane Street, OpenAI, HRT, Citadel, Susquehanna, and more)
• Pulled some all nighters for the OpenAI Hackathon (and my Signals class…)
• And made some new friends! :)

I look forward to what the future has in store!

happy FDOC!

August 25, 2025 — Urbana, IL

Today was the first day of classes! This is my third semester (of six) at the University of Illinois, and this time, I’ll be taking classes such as Data Structures & Algorithms, Analog Signals Processing, Statistics & Probability II, Thermal Physics, and Quantum Physics. I’ll also be working as an intern at Scale AI.

Aside from all this, I’m looking forward to scratching some hackathons off my bucket list (starting with OpenAI) and playing some volleyball!

@scale conference

August 13, 2025 — Santa Clara, CA

I was invited to attend the @Scale Conference, which featured speakers from ByteDance, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, and more! It was a great event where I got to meet many engineers who really loved their work. Talks & workshops included discussions on Meta’s efforts with Generative AI, using PyTorch Symmetric Memory for Programming Distributed AI, and Performance Optimizations for Large-scale Services. Super cool stuff!

summer’s over! (ish)

August 7, 2025 — Cambridge, MA

Today, I wrapped up my first corporate internship at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I lived in an MIT fraternity (per the reccomendation of my boss), and met some cool people at both Harvard and MIT. I also had a lot of fun working on my intern projects developing internal tools as a Machine Learning intern, and look forward to what the future has to bring! I’ll be spending the rest of my summer exploring Boston & Cambridge, trying lobster rolls, clam chowder, and different spots at Harvard. These are definitely two of my favorite cities!

P.S. If you’re interested in finding out how much Jefe’s I’ve had this summer, so was I. Here’s a calculation to get a rough estimate:

• Jefe’s has a deal where, every $50 spent, you can get $5 off your next purchase
• I would use every $5 to get either a can of Fanta or a bottle of Jarritos
• By the end of the summer, I had amassed 18 cans & bottles
• The normal order was $12.03, the order with the drink & discount was ~$10
• 18 ($50 + $10) = $1,080

And this wasn’t even counting the Chipotle I had my first month (before I switched over to Jefe’s)…

greylock techfair

July 24, 2025 — San Francisco, CA

I was one of ~500 students accepted into the Greylock Techfair, and event held to connect students with up-and-coming startups like Mercor, a37, Ramp, Rippling, Glean, and more. The event was held at Oracle Park (boo Giants, go Cubs!) and catering featured classic Baseball meals (hotdogs, burgers, etc) as well as some vegetarian options. I met lots of cool founders from Stanford, MIT, and other universities, and even interviewed at some of these companies (they flew me out for final rounds, which was so nice of them!). I was fortunate enought to receive a fall internship, but look forward to seeing these companies grow and joining their team in the future! Was also invited to the more exclusive brunch being held by Greylock that weekend, but could not attend as I was out of town.

jane street machine learning dinner

July 23, 2025 — New York City, NY

I (along with ~90 other undergraduate students from Columbia, Cornell, Berkeley, and other universities) was invited to attend the Jane Street Machine Learning Engineering Talk hosted in their NYC Office. We were treated with a Mexican buffet & then got to meet some MLEs that gave us insight into the work they do at the company, specifically related to optimizing training processes. Loved it! Was also invited to attend the Guts++ Competition in Chicago, but was out of town that weekend.