Introduction
Graduation is not the end; it’s the beginning to start a new journey after graduation. This is how the journey begins!
As a Mathematics Major and Engineering Life in KKBOX
I attended my BS Degree in Applied Mathematics from National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. After I graduated last year, I have totally no idea what I should do and what I could do in the future. I then started to apply for jobs in both Taipei and Taichung.
Luckily, I sought a full-time position as a Software Quality Assurance Assistant Engineer with KKBOX Group. During the first two months, I learned a lot of testing skills via Jenkins, Confluence, TestRail, etc. The period in KKBOX was so great due to free beverage and snack on a daily basis. It is wonderful to have such great colleagues and supervisors though, however, I reckoned that I couldn’t apply my mathematics knowledge to anything in my work. As a result, this job became much more boring and dull.
Accordingly, I then asked my supervisor whether I could conduct a NLP-related project which I was interested in. Equipped with programming knowledge in Matlab, Python and R, my supervisor duly allowed me to undertake this project. Therefore, I created a polarity text classifier for the reviews of UtaPass, a music streaming app, and divided the massive amounts of reviews into positive and negative areas, which allowed me to resolve user’s issues both effectively and efficiently.
Aside from academic knowledge and working experience, extracurricular competitions have figured highly in my life. One notable contest occurred at Kaggle Featured Code Competition, wherein I was able to detect the toxicity of conversations with Jigsaw Unintended Bias in Toxicity Classification dataset. At the same time, another competition at TeraSoft allowed me to construct a deep learning-based merchandise detector for a self-service store.
During these project and competitions, I realised that possessing a BS degree is simply inadequate to get a better job. In consequence, I decide to learn more about machine learning upon a postgraduate degree course, and as the field of computer science focuses on the study of NLP. I believe a degree in this discipline will allow me to pursue a variety of careers.
Apply for NAIST
In May 2019, I wrote a letter to Professor Nakamura in NAIST (Nara Institute of Science and Technology). His current research interests include speech-to-speech translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, spoken dialog systems, multi-modal communication, and brain activity sensing in linguistics, which gave me lots of attention.
When I received the letter from Professor in the morning, my legs felt like jelly, not because of fear, but on the cloud nine. It means so much to me. Three days after, I made a leave and took a flight to Nara, Japan immediately. I was so nervous but exciting to visit the laboratory at NAIST.
After having a great conversation with Prof. Nakamura and Prof. Yoshino, I decided to apply for 2019 fall admission. On top of that, I also got a letter of acceptance from Prof. Nakamura.
Applying for Master’s course, I prepared the document below,
- Application form
- Examination voucher
- Receipt form for examination fee payment
- Graduation/Expected Graduation certificate
- Transcript
- Research proposal
- Document verifying English Proficiency
- Address label
- Letter of Acceptance
On the examination day, I took mathematics test first, which was an oral examination on questions of mathematics (Linear Algebra and Calculus) written out in English.
The second exam was questions regarding the research proposal and areas of information science relevant to the examinees’ area of specialization. Examinees are required to give a self intro of no more than three minutes (in English) without equipment or handouts, which should be prepared in advance. The questions asked by Prof. Nakamura was the following,
- Please explain your research proposal.
- Have you done reading lots of papers regarding to your area of specialization? Please make some examples.
- How to utilize the model into your research proposal?
- What else could you improve on your model?
- Why could mathematics profession be your strength?
- What is the connection between Question-Answering and your research proposal?
- Could you implement your chat-bot with the state-of-the-art models right now? Please illustrate it.
I didn’t perform well on the last question; however, thanks for Prof. Nakamura, I did realise how to improve my skills in some respect. After exam, I just wanted to have fun anyway, and relax in Japan in the next few days.
Announcements of the results was really fast, it was on July 19th 2019. As expected, I did not pass the exam.
Apply for Sheffield
In order to get a better chance, I need to gain more experience. I then decided to quit my job at KKBOX and apply for Universities in the U.K. In the whole September, I did a lot of research on the universities in the U.K. Next, I started to prepare for IELTS test on October 26th 2019.
Finally, I got my IELTS transcript two weeks later. I submitted it to the universities in the U.K. Surprisingly, Aston University gave me Unconditional Offer in two days; University of Essex gave me Unconditional Offers in three days; University of Swansea gave me Unconditional Offer in five days.
The most incredible thing is that I received offer from The University of Sheffield on 16th December 2019. Computer Science with Speech and Language Processing is my most favorite discipline.
So I retook IELTS on 4th January 2020. Unfortunately, I got a touch of flu in the middle of December. This was a hard time for me to prepare IELTS test, cause I could not focus on my preparation.
Unexpectedly, I got a band 6.5! To be honest, it indeed is unbelievable!
Conclusion
I am definitely super excited and really looking forward to attending Sheffield this year.
Here I am, Sheffield.
