Re: Life / my summer, summarized

My life condensed into variably interesting posts on the internet

Background image courtesy of Marek Piwnicki

Hello, world!

Finally, after two straight months of traveling and learning, I’m back home in Sudbury to type out this newsletter. My apologies if you missed me.

A lot’s happened (probably too much to communicate intelligibly) so I won’t even attempt to cover it all in a single post. Instead, I wanted to condense this summer into the moments that stood out most. Here they are…

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Atlas Fellowship
(11 days / Berkeley, California)

Learned about AI alignment, brushed up on my Bayesian reasoning, hiked Mount Livermore, created a GPT4 app in less than two hours, received a $10K scholarship.

Also visited the Innovative Genomics Institute (founded by Dr. Jennifer Doudna) where my friends and I played around with genetically-engineered plants and tumor organoids.

Huge shoutout to Jonas Vollmer, as well as the Atlas instructors and ops team for making this program real. Also: thank you Dr. Cho and Dr. Braverman for hosting us at the IGI, and thank you Zilose Lyons for graciously responding to our cold email.

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Masason Foundation Summer Program
(5 days / Tokyo, Japan)

Visited RIKEN (Japan’s largest national lab), saw a quantum computer in action, walked inside a particle accelerator (what?!), sat in a self-driving bus, explored a four-storey penguin-themed convenience store, toured SoftBank’s headquarters.

Naturally, I also squeezed out as much value as humanly possible from my 418-day Japanese streak on Duolingo.

This trip simply would not have been possible without the radical support of the Masason secretariat team. Thank you so much to Masuda-san, Sogo-san, Stark-san, and Maniwa-san for having us in Tokyo this summer (ありがとうございました)!

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Explore Fellowship
(5 days / NYC & Kent, Connecticut):

Circumnavigated New York at 6:00 AM by foot, spoke with the founder of the Wild Animal Initiative, went stargazing, discussed pandemic preparedness with the co-lead of the Nucleic Acid Observatory, converted to veganism for a week, freestyle rapped about Epicureanism with a philosophy professor.

Once again, thank you to Aaron Mayer, the Explore counselors, and all the incredible guest speakers that delivered talks at our camp. Oh, and a huge shoutout goes to all my Explore friends reading this newsletter (if you’re my friend from Explore and you haven’t been reading this newsletter, now would be a great time!)

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Now What?

Hands down, this was one of the most rewarding and enjoyable summers I’ve had. Sometimes I wish I could just stop typing and beam my memories directly into your head. Unfortunately, these words will have to suffice until our neurotech catches up.

Except, the fun isn’t over yet. In less than three weeks, I’ll be starting my life anew at Stanford. And even before that, you’ll be hearing from me about my latest invention.

tl;dr: we’re just getting started.

get ready,
-aaryan

P.S. I’m going to take this chance to call out my friend Sualeha who I met in New York recently. Thanks for lighting a fire under me to write this newsletter.

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