A Sense of Cohesion

There comes a moment in time when you feel like everything comes together, even though there seems to be no coherent way to explain how exactly they fit together. It’s like that hunch, that feeling you have as you pick up a puzzle piece and find out it actually does fit in the particular spot you were eyeing.

Allow me to explain: my externship at Drexel University under the guidance of Dr. Youngmoo Kim was perhaps the most important event of my college career - I felt, at least over winter break, that I was still swimming adrift in a sea of indecisiveness, that my future lay in the hope that someday I might come across an opportunity that would be mediocre at best, but nonetheless something I could pursue.

In short, I worked on a small minor and inconsequential project involving a corpus of audio files of speakers (called TIMIT) and I tried to extract some sort of relevant, physical information about each phoneme within the audio. But in the process I was inspired by the vigor, the energy, and intensity of the other grad and undergraduate students who were working in the same lab. There was something about their focus, the fact that they spent their days and evenings pursuing their interests, that gripped me and never let go.

And so here I am, deciding to take a course at the University of Pennsylvania next week in order to complement the work I might do over the summer under the guidance of the same person, working with the same corpus of text and the same program I was exposed to while I worked in the Endangered Languages lab last year.

And it has everything to do with what I love to do.