2023 Reflections

Looking back on my writings from this time last year, made me realize again how many twists and turns that happened to me this year. Let me walk you through it.

As of the start of the year, the acquisition of Emmersion was complete and we officially became IXL Learning employees. I was starting to feel like a valuable team member. I had genuine friends at work. I was also getting very interested in our product. I learned a lot about elicited imitation and tried to start self learning about NLP.

Because of this, I started exploring the idea turning my career towards the world of language technology. I was very interested in the ASR products that we used as a company. I helped lead an initiative about understanding the error rates of our current solutions and a few other state-of-the-art solutions on the market. I also wanted to start understanding more about using open response to inform our language proficiency score. I started conversations at work with other departments at Rosetta Stone about language ML and NLP models. I was interested in particular about being on their ASR team, because Rosetta has developed their own ASR that can run on-device. These conversations got me curious about further education in computational linguistics and NLP. I did some research and found that there were some interesting schools in the UK that are really highly ranked for those studies, so I decided take a shot in the dark and apply to the University of Edinburgh. I sent in my application as a part of the last wave of applications, so I didn't have much hope of getting into this elite program on such short notice. To read more about my decision about why UE check out my other blog post.

I was really happy at Emmersion/Rosetta Stone/IXL Learning. I was wanting to have a great career run there, but unfortunately, IXL had a different idea. IXL decided that they were wanting to consolidate the entire team into Rosetta's North Carolina office. Basically the entire Emmersion leadership and product teams were let go. I became unfortunate collateral in the game of corporate restructuring. This all happened in May, and during the week that we were still trying to figure out what was going on, I received the decision from the University. I was accepted. It was a crazy week to say the least.

So, I spent my summer trying to decide if going back to school and moving to a foreign country was worth it for us. I was also worried about trying to get part-time work. We also had lots of fun plans that we made when we were both working. During the summer, we spent a month or two in Sweden as usual. We had visitors which was super fun. One of my best friends from college came to hang out with us in Stockholm. We went to Skansen, wake boarded, and spent a lot of time in a sauna. It was a really fun time. On top of that our friends Jenna and Brycen came to Sweden and spent 4-5 days exploring Stockholm. It was great having them in Sweden with us. After a few days, we went to the airport together and flew on a trip to France. Jenna and Brycen are both French speakers and were able to show us around Paris, Versailles, Caan, and Normandy. One of the highlights of the trip was probably when we drove to Mont St. Michel. It was so beautiful. Traveling was definitely on our personal road map for the year, but it was hard after the layoff. It made the trip more stressful than it should have been.

Part of our travels in the summer was navigating housing in Edinburgh. Everyone that we talked to said that the housing market is crazy in Edinburgh. We can attest that that is absolutely true. As a part of our time in Sweden we decided to take a 4 day trip to Scotland in order to explore apartment options. It was a fun trip, but that was when the possibility of moving abroad became real for us. I am grateful for the hard work Victoria put in for finding apartments and signing up for viewings. Because if that, we were able to find a wonderful apartment that is only a 10 min walk to my school. Many things that happened to make our move very easy, so we consider ourselves very blessed.

We did many things this year, but definitely moving to Scotland was the thing that will forever define 2023 for Victoria and I. I have a lot of great things to say about Scotland. First of all, I have felt very welcome. People in Scotland are very friendly and respectful. We feel very safe where we live and everywhere we have been. We have tried to explore Scotland by taking day trips for important events like our anniversary and when we have had guests. We have seen the east coast, Loch Ness, Loch Lomond, and several National forests. There is still so much to see, good thing we will still be there for a while.

School has been nothing short of a great experience. There are many things that make studying at a European university different from an American university. They do positive marking. Meaning that we start with 0 points and get points if we fulfill the requirements. It took some adjustment, but it’s a good way to get that bell curve my BYU classes always dreamt of. I have been a lot more impressed and happy with the rigor and academic expectation of students at UE. I have a lot of opportunities to sit in on seminars, presentations, research groups, etc. Speech technology research is really interesting. A PhD is unfortunately too much time and not enough compensation for it to be a realistic consideration for me, but the idea of it is very tempting.

As we ring in the new year, I wanted to lay out a few reflections, learnings and goals for the new year.

Reflections

Education is worth seeking, especially when it is something that is incredibly interesting to you.

Relationships take a lot of work to maintain. But they are special assets that should be worth the effort.

I still don't read enough.

Learnings

There were certainly a lot of learnings about programming, speech, nlp, and machine learning this year.

Its up to you to make friends. Making friends is difficult, because it takes effort.

There are a lot of opportunities and ways to network. There are many groups, websites, and activities that facilitate networking.

Goals

Graduate/get a job/start a company.

Read a few books for fun and a few for personal development.

Random Facts 

Although I’ve lived in Scotland for the last 4 months, I have never been to England, but Scotland is the only new country I managed to visit this year.

We got 1 new nephew who is so cute.