A little about me

How did I get into my master? Sometimes I don't even know

I got accepted into the  Language and Communication Technologies Erasmus Master, and many times I wonder if the committee made a mistake. Yep, impostor syndrome is my way of life for now.

Let's recount the parts of my story that are relevant to this blog (and some not that relevant)

1. My academic background 

 I studied at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, the least catholic place in all of Peru and most forward thinking place in the country, a place truly dedicated to education, something remarkable when most universities in my country strive to be employee factories, but I digress....

 

 

My major was Mathematics. 

(wait, don't run!)

 

Though it was not my first option, I choose to major in Mathematics in order to learn how to learn, and along the way I worked a little in Control Theory, but my mathematical passion was in Mathematical Logic. One of the best decisions of my life :)

Now, you may think this makes a good segway into being good at Computer Science, but in fact I hated it. Or at least hated so much how it was taught to me, that I never bothered to learn it right.

In reality, I learned Mathematics through a "pen and blackboard" approach. Hopefully one day my professors will catch up with technology, but not in the foreseeable future. That's a result from the fact that being a mathematician is a very low-risk profession (I mean physically, not economically).

 

During my studies I got to do exchanges in Germany and Mexico, and summer courses in Brazil and U.S.A (funny, because summer in Brazil is from December to March, and in the USA it is from June to September)

All of this must sound amazing/impressive/intimidating, right? Well, only academically. 

My personal reality was really bad. For most of the time I was really depressed, my personal relationships where unattended, and I retracted to my own thoughts, which of course only worsened this cycle. 

 

As it happens, doing Mathematics was a sort of good escapism: 

Reasoning about abstract concepts/objects helped me forget my problems and realize that there was beautiful stuff in life. 

 

That must sound really strange, how can intangible stuff have an effect on someone?

(that's a weird segway into Benacerraf's dilemma in the philosophy of Mathematics!)

 

The short version is that it was like looking at the sea for a long time: the vastness and uncaring-ness of what you're looking at is something that makes you realize that your problems are temporary, while the sea is not.

I also realized that Mathematics Academia was not a place for me: though I really like doing math, I also have other interests. I also wanted to have some savings before enrolling in graduate school, in order to not life off scholarships for many years.

And so, my graduation was at the end of 2018, with me not really knowing what I was going to do with my life.

2. Languages

Over the course of my life, I have always had an interest on human languages. When I was little, I would end up on Wikipedia for hours reading about how Basque is a language isolate, how some languages used clicks, constructed languages, reconstructed langauges, and so on, and on, and on....

Being from the Peruvian coast, Spanish is my first language. The majority of Peruvians are monolinguals in Spanish, and so my upbringing was also like that. Sad, in a country with more than 30 indigenous languages.

First I studied English while I was around 13 to 16. My family insisted in registering me at a well-known English institute because of some non-sensical reasons like "having a good CV". That institute was a waste of time and a money extractor for aspirational Peruvian families. I truly learned English watching stuff I really liked on Youtube, and then using English books for university.

 

 For some years I tried to learn Ancient Greek at university. That's when I started attending classes at the Philosophy department. Though I studied really hard, I can hardly remember much now about the language itself, though it had it's advantages: 

• Greek made me go through the pain of learning a language with a case system, which was useful for the future
• I'm no longer intimidated by non-latin scripts
  

 

 Second I studied German when I was around 18. After a short 1-week journey to Germany I romanticized the country and wanted to study there in the future. That was the exchange I made when I was 21. Living there 6 months helped de-romanticize it, and I learned that every place has its own problems.

 

After studying German, the language-learning vice was already on motion.

Third I studied Quechua, the Ayacucho/Chanka variety, this is still in progress. Before you get surprised about that, after almost 4 years studying it on and off (too few people to get classes to open), I'd say my level is still around A2-B1, keeping conversations is hard, I always forget the vocabulary, and can only read a couple of lines at a time. My reason for studying it was that I would not get a good chance to learn it if I left Peru. 

Learning it I saw the face of Peru that won't show on tourism ads: the social stigma against indigenous languages is strong in our classist peruvian society. I had to pay for the classes myself and I studied it in secret, because my parents had very strong negative opinions about that "language of peasants".

Fourth I studied Portuguese. My main motivation here was that the program lasted a year and that that gave me a chance to study in Brazil. That was the summer course in made in Rio de Janeiro. Now, to many people that sounds idyllic, but the reality is different: Rio de Janeiro is the most unequal place I've been to yet. Venturing outside the "Zona Sul" (South Zone, that's where all the famous beaches are) is where you'll see the true face of a strongly socioeconomically divided country. On the good side, long lasting friendships where made there :)

Fifth I started studying Latin, this is still in progress. My method is the wonderful Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata as a self learner. That's where I got the title for this blog btw, "quiêscêns" is the participle present of "quiêscere", which roughly translates to "to relax, to leisure", so "quiêscens" means something like "the one who relaxes/leisures". I'm studying it because of all the tradition in philosophy and mathematics that's originally in Latin, but also as a relaxing exercise.

Sixth I started studying French, this is still in progress. To be honest, I have been indifferent to French culture all my life: I don't get why the media romanticizes it (specially USA media). Then, why did I started studying it? Well, I started after being accepted to my Master, the LCT program, and being assigned for my first year to the University of Lorraine. I've then realized that the francophone countries of Africa look like really cool places to do some linguistics though.

 

 

My goal is to get to be really fluent in 10 languages :)

3 My work background

The three months after my graduation where very tense: my savings were diminishing and I needed to find a "real job".

As it happens, some friends at university worked at Wolfram Research. After talking with some of the guys there, they recommended me to attend the Wolfram Summer School at Boston, USA. It lasted three weeks and was weirdly intellectually satisfying and socially challenging. The other participants were brilliant people from everywhere, and I made some lasting and non-lasting friendships there. The social issue was on me, because I put too much pressure on myself to "keep up with the rest", which hindered my mental peace. Oh, how I wish I had known that!

 

After returning from the Summer School, I had an interview with the guy in charge of Wolfram Research South America, and the hired me.

 

 

Those first months at Wolfram were very strong in imposter syndrome for me. I had no idea how to behave in a job environment, I had never programmed seriously (with a product for users in mind), and I got assigned a project strongly related to Computer Science (oh my!).

 

Thankfully, the environment and the people there were very relaxed, so my main source of stress was my own pressure to hide that I had no idea what I was doing.

With the months, I learned more and more, it was really in my second year that I got more confidence in my work.

That's when the pandemic arrived, and home-officing started. Working with all the mental load and uncertainty of the first months of quarantine was horrible. I hope never to be in that situation again.

 

After some months I asked to be relocated to a project more related to Linguistics, and my time there improved amazingly. Yeah, my algorithms where not very efficient, and some stuff had to be done manually, but I got it to work and even solved some bugs from many years ago! I did not notice the hours nor was as stressed as before in this new project. 

Then, some weeks ago, I quit my job in order to make all the bureaucracy for starting the Masters.

4 Choosing my masters

 Though I will tell the complete story in another post, the summary is that I wanted to find a place where I could be "in both worlds" : Humanities + Sciences

I searched for a lot of places, like economics, to no result, I didn't really see myself doing that.

And one happy day, a friend told me about Computational Linguistics. This conversation started being about Logic and Philosophy of language, but when he started describing some ideas of the field, it was music to my ears.

In Computational linguistics I saw the chance to combine three interests

• Humanities, through the social and philosophical sides from Linguistics
• Sciences, through the Mathematics involved in technology (and that too many engineers gleefully are not aware of!)
• Languages

Plus the bonus of an allegedly good job market.

That's how I started searching for masters in Computational Linguistics, and eventually came upon Language and Communication Technologies Erasmus Master

5 Holes in my formation

These are the things that I have meant to learn for a long time, because they would be helpful for my masters:

• I have no idea about Python, R, or SQL
• I have never done anything with machine learning 
• Computer Science (data structures and algorithms) make me wanna puke
  
• Programming seriously is still very difficult for me
• I don't have a formal education on Linguistics
• Have more social confidence to work in groups
  

I'm really self-conscious about all of these.

Am I complaining that I have not yet learned the things I'll learn in the Masters? Sometimes I think that, but worrying about that kind of stuff is my specialty (not healthy, I know, I'm working on it).

 

 

So yeah, that's partially me.