Intro

This blog will include mostly about IT specifically Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence and rarely tell a bit about my personal life. However, please do feel free to correct me since I consider as a Software Engineer NOT yet a Machine Learning Engineer/Scientist.

Biography

Short Version (TL;DR)

Long Version

About my educational background, I graduated SookMyung Girl's High School in 2012 February but never ended up attending graduation commencement since I messed up a significant College Entrance Exam (In other words, Korean S.A.T). That time, I was already taking an Intensive English Program at UIUC (University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne). After 2 months of study in ACT and Toefl, I was able to apply a few U.S colleges which had a later deadline than other decent colleges. Luckily I got admitted to Purdue University while I never heard back from other colleges (+lost nearly 45 pounds).

After going through lots of academic challenges, I graduated Purdue University with Computer Science major in May 2016 with a 3.7/4.0 GPA which wasn't bad enough to get admission from Georgia Institute of Technology Masters Program. However, I had a strong motivation to be financially independent of my parent and wanted to start my career in industry instead of writing M.S thesis since I was burned out learning the theoretical aspect of Computer Science. Thus, I went straight ahead to attend COC (College of Computing) Career Fair, and yes, there were a bunch of long lines (especially the big four which includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon).

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Achieving an on-campus interview was challenging because every student had to wait at least an hour to talk with recruiters/engineers and after that long wait that student has approximately 5 minutes to explain all about his/her projects. I still remember an engineer from Vmware just simply asked the difference between quick sort and merge sort and decided to give an on-campus interview. Although I managed to obtain many on-campus interviews and phone interviews from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Vmware, and Groupon, etc, I was not prepared enough to solve those technical problems. I failed too many times in the coding interview, nevertheless was learning from these failures. In early 2017, I had one last chance to get a 2017 summer internship, and that last opportunity was given by Twilio a cloud communication company located in San Francisco (near Silicon Valley). I never expected to have 3 rounds of technical interviews just for an internship and I was again fortunate enough to pass all of them and finally succeeded starting a career as a Software Engineer in Silicon Valley.

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As soon as I got a full-time offer from Twilio, I graduated a semester early from Georgia Tech. After the Graduation Commencement held in December 2017, I road-tripped from Atlanta to Los Angeles which took around 8 days with fabulous experience visiting local restaurants, bars, and hotels. During winter break, I spent time with my parents in Los Angeles enjoyed eating home food which I missed for a long time. I started a full-time job as a Software Engineer in the Fraud Services team at Twilio in early 2018. In Twilio, I was delighted to learn a lot from smart and talented people around me, and Scala (functional programming) completely immersed me in the world of programming.

Unfortunately, I had to go through complicated circumstances and was forced to leave the United States in late October 2019. In early 2020, Okestro (Good rated startup which builds AIOps Software Solution) gave me a decent offer with a position of Team Leader in A.I & Big Data Team. However, I still had an obligation on returning to the states since my parent was living there. Therefore, I decided to resign from my position and now I'm studying GRE (my old GRE score expired) for graduate school to obtain Computer Science Ph.D. and get an opportunity to resume my career in Silicon Valley as a Machine Learning Engineer. At the same time, I will start working as a Research Assistant under professor Jaegul Choo in KAIST Graduate School of AI Seungnam Research Center.