But it’s been so good! So many of these friends I’ve not seen in a while - we’re all busy, and myself, every since university has started, I can’t say I’ve really had any lull periods other than this month. So it’s been nice to spend time and catch up with many of these friends who I care for very deeply, and spend some time on myself recharging and reflecting.

And here I am now, on the cusp on another great adventure. I’m kinda nervous, kinda excited. It’s 12.53pm as I write this, and I’m more or less packed, set to have dinner with two close friends and then off I am on a flight to Zurich.

It probably feels like a bigger deal than it is because many of my friends are graduating before I am (they study 4 years, I study 5) and are going abroad for grad school - so for many of them I won’t see for maybe a year and a half or so, maybe more. I’m happy and excited for all of these people - they are talented, intelligent and down-to-earth people who will do great things; I’ll just miss them, is all. And I think I’ll look back on and occasionally miss the simpler times. After all, in year 1 and 2 of university, everyone stayed on campus, hung out regularly, and the greatest worry we had were our grades.

When I’m back, a lot of things will be different, I think. I’d have completed a semester at ETH, worked at Palantir, most of my friends would be abroad and/or graduated, and I imagine I, too, would have seen some change and growth. I’m equally scared and excited.

11 more hours till I’m on that plane.

• very cold
• very friendly
• very expensive

I like it here. People are nice, public transport is great, I generally feel safe. The city centre is beautiful.

The last 24 hours have been focused on buying stuff, because god, my room was really barebones, and there’s so much minute overhead to just living, lol. Been to Ikea and carried a bunch of stuff back, been to a couple supermarkets and done the same, and I’m almost done. Just left with some small quality-of-life purchases like a drying rack.

Day 1: landed, got a SIM card, rail pass, checked in, bought some groceries, went to ikea, made some friends.

Day 2: went to the city centre with some friends, spent a ton of time walking around, had sandwich, some famous hot chocolate, saw a cool church and some great views of the river, hit a big supermarket, and cooked my first meal. Made more friends.

Day 3: chatted with new people over breakfast. Went to the city centre for a tour. Made friends with people on said tour, and spent basically the whole day with them. Went back, made dinner (very bad yakisoba attempt, it’s so hard without the right ingredients ._.), had some nice conversations and made more new friends.

I’m so tired, but so far, so good. I hope I’ll continue to make friends and do cool things. Tomorrow, is my first German class. Fingers crossed!

As I write this, I have been on Swiss soil for 14 days now. Life is going pretty well - I’ve settled in quite nicely I think. It’s gone by quick though. In the last week or so I’ve completed German 1 (it’s 3 x 2 hours a day, every day) which fulfils the first half of A1 German, climbed my first hill (the Swiss call it a molehill, but to my Singaporean mind the hike was tall), cooked my first rack of lamb for valentine’s day (my girlfriend was kind enough to visit me from London), watched my first movie abroad (Swiss tickets are 17 CHF, and they have intermissions!) and got very cold a lot of the time.

It’s been very good, but very exhausting. Moving abroad and setting up a comfortable (if temporary) “home”, doing 6 hours of high-intensity language learning daily and packing my schedule to spend time with my girlfriend while she’s visiting is pretty tough. Switzerland is beautiful though, and people here are generally very welcoming. And thank god for the fact that most people speak English - I’d have such a tough time otherwise.

Today in particular, my girlfriend has headed back to London, and I’m alone here. In the coming week, it’s a bunch of admin and welcome events, the start of lessons and presumably a bunch of socializing and a return to using my brain after a month-long break. I’m really looking forward to it.

This year feels like it’s shaping up to be a pretty good year, and I have a lot of things to look forward to. Fingers crossed next week is a good week, too.

Can’t help start to feel lonely, though. Moving abroad isn’t quite as rosey as it’s painted back home, I suppose. The exchange coordinator in our briefing did mention that this tends to happen - you start off all excited because everything is new, at some point get tired and homesick, and then eventually adjust. I suppose I’m trending just like the average person - which gives me some comfort, because I know things will get better :-).

I entered the country on the 2nd of February. Today, it’s a Wednesday, on the 8th of March. I’ve been meaning to find some time to sit and write, but the semester is starting to get busy. But I have a bit of time today - mostly because I’m sick and decided to take it easy (it’s not easy getting better in a cold, dry country), so here I am.

1. My classes/research: generally, great!

I’m reading four classes this semester:

• 263-5354-00L Large Language Models
• 227-0558-00L Principles of Distributed Computing
• 252-0341-01L Information Retrieval
• 363-1000-00L Financial Economics

Why did I choose these four classes? Well, as a non-German speaking dude, my options at ETH are limited to Masters-level courses that are taught in English, so that limits my pool. I also came to ETH with the explicit goal of challenging myself and taking interesting, hard courses that deepen my knowledge of deep learning/ML engineering and its adjacent fields. The first three courses fit that bill very naturally.

Why financial economics, then? Well, I ask myself that too. I have absolutely zero interest. It’s a practical matter - I’m four economics electives away from completing my second degree in economics. Clearing one abroad helps to reduce my course load when I go home. It is the only map-able economics module I can do here. So, here we are.

But I love the courses generally, and I think I’ve got an interesting spectrum down. PODC and IR are taught similarly to higher-level bachelor’s courses - the course is structured, well thought out and generally it’s an information dump, if that makes sense. They teach me new things, I learn new things, I do practice, I take the exam. All fine and dandy.

LLMs… it’s a new course. The lecturer is literally writing the textbook as the course progresses. So that can be a little jarring at times. Add that to the fact that tutorials are also being written as they go, there’s… not much structure. And yet, the content is extremely refreshing, and it really does feel like it’s on the cutting edge of research - to my knowledge, Ryan’s work is one of the first to provide such a comprehensive formal description of language models. So that (in my opinion) makes up for its drawbacks. It’s pretty hard and heavy though - it’s like 90 pages of proof-heavy readings per week, which can sometimes be unpleasant.

Financial economics. Not a fan. But I’ll get through it. I haven’t attended a single lecture, lol. But I’m reasonably certain I can self study, because the lecture slides, textbook chapters and tutorials have been released, and I’ve been consistent with them.

I’m also working on a research project with I2R back home (remotely) and in person here with Dr. Ryan’s lab. It’s a bit busy, but the topics - multimodal engagement detection, and explainable evaluation for large language models - are exciting and tickle my brain. I’m excited to work on them! :-)

2. Living abroad, more generally: pros, cons, and I think I’m okay with it - just okay

I’m not sure what it’s like in other countries - and I suspect it’s different because of the relative sizes of other countries - but in Singapore, being able to go abroad seems like a big thing. When someone says that they’re going abroad to study or work, they are often met with “wows” and “congratulations”. It’s some sort of a medium-to-big deal. My peers have faced that, and I too have. A related phenomenon is a general desire to emigrate and leave - you can see it here, here and here, amongst the many other articles and forum posts about it within the Singapore context. And it’s an interesting contrast to what immigrants often think about Singapore, which seems to bounce between the extremes of authoritarian dystopia and a great place. It’s a strange feeling, then, to be on this side of the discussion and experience what it’s like to live abroad for a while.

So far, anyway, I think life is pretty good back home. Not to say that there aren’t flaws, and not to say that the relative privilege of my upbringing has not influenced that, but life here is different, sometimes in good ways, and sometimes not so much. I love the weather here, how people generally have a greater respect for and focus on living a good life (even if, for example, the financial decisions they make make me squirm), and how people seem to have a wider perspective of the region. I think some of it comes from the rich history and varied geography of the region - Europe is so incredibly heterogeneous, and so much immigration and free movement, I suppose, is bound to create this. I like a lot of these things, and I think Singapore and Singaporeans can do better on a lot of them too.

But there are too, things I like less. So far, they are mostly practical things - safety and social responsibility, the inconvenience that comes with good labour practices (e.g. everything closes on Sunday - everything) and larger spaces. The less practical things, I think they are subjective, and I have my own preferences - some fit better than others to my lifestyle and values.

I guess this is a bit of an unstructured ramble, but what I’m trying to express is this feeling of being out of place that I suppose all immigrants experience, and this feeling of being ungrounded as I learn about this new environment. And also this feeling of having new, fresh ideas that I think can and arguably should be done back home, as well as feelings of gratitude for how things are back home. I find myself - more often than expected - going “we do it better back home”, and that gives me a tiny tingling of pride to be a Singaporean. Kinda like this article loosely captures.

A lot of my friends will probably disagree with me - some of them have described their 6 months or 3 years or however long abroad as “the best time of their life” or how x city was the “best city they’ve ever lived in”. But that’s fine. My opinion will probably evolve as I get more settled - I have after all only spent about 5 weeks here.

I have unfortunately fallen sick this week, but I hope next week will be better :D.

3. Travelling is expensive

So far, I’ve been to Liechtenstein, Bern (Switzerland), and I’m heading to London this weekend to visit my girlfriend. We’re also planning trips to Paris, Florence, Naples, and Rome. Maybe it’s the penny pincher in me, but god, this hurts my wallet so much.

I’ve said this to a lot of people - to me, the “once in a lifetime” perspective to me is a little misconstrued - what’s “once in a lifetime” is the opportunity to study at one of the world’s top schools, to live abroad, to be independent. I can always come back to Europe. But I suppose it doesn’t hurt to see the world a little, even as a tourist.

Well, till the next time I have some time to reflect and log. But I think it’s going to be a hectic 6 weeks ahead - lots of studying, lots of research, lots of travel. With a little bit of luck, the weather will be good, I will stay healthy and generally have a good time.

So much for hoping for the weeks ahead for good health. Life can be funny. Anyway, I’m down with COVID. So, that constrains me to my room, mostly. That’s good for the introvert in me.

It’s been a very hectic two weeks. In the last month or so I’ve intimately experienced the Swiss healthcare system (honestly, it’s pretty good) because I tore my MCL playing badminton. But, my tickets to Italy over Easter were bought and non-refundable, so after several hospital visits and frantic replanning, we went to Rome and Florence.

It was a very solid (if exhausting) trip. Tomorrow, I head back to Singapore because I need to apply for my visa (for London) from Singapore - it’s a little bit annoying. But it’ll be nice to be home for a bit I think. I’m starting to get a little homesick, so this comes at a nice time.

Wish me luck, because I need to be studying hard while dealing with my leg and jet lag. I’m very behind on my work.

Wow, the last month has flown by. Felt like I’ve barely had any time just to decompress and relax. But today, I have a small pocket as I wait for my recorded lecture to be published, so here I am instead. In the three weeks I was home, some stuff happened, and I think taking some time to reflect on them is interesting, and some of these thoughts are worth sharing.

Going home did not taste as sweet as I expected it to

In the weeks prior to heading home, I’d actually begun to feel homesick. My experience abroad had been almost exactly as the briefing had mentioned - you start off excited, start to feel homesick, before getting better and eventually stabilising. I’d been a bit homesick and was generally on the up, but I thought that going home would be nice. It was, but it also wasn’t quite as sweet as I thought it’d be. Going back to familiarity was nice - I was so excited on that ride home from Changi to sit at my desk, sleep on my bed, eat familiar food - the feelings that I’d missed the most. Those feelings, however, were fleeting. I sat down, I ate, I slept. And then day 2 was just like any other day in Singapore. Was a little anticlimatic, in truth.

It was an interesting feeling. Perhaps that’s what some of my more well-traveled or studying-abroad peers and relatives mean when they say they don’t really miss home. Because perhaps I didn’t, either - I just missed not feeling out-of-place, and in Zurich, I often do.

A big decision was made

So, I decided to drop my second degree in economics. It came after a good chat with my partner. I think it’s the right choice.

I stayed on a European time zone

Turns out, going backwards in time from Singapore to Europe is much easier to adapt to than the other way around. I find it that way, anyway. Going to Europe is like sleeping late and then messing up your sleep schedule. Which isn’t hard. Coming home is like fixing it. Which is hard. So for my first 7 days at home, I slept at 4 and woke at 11. Was an interesting experience eating dinner at midnight.

Man, Singapore really has so many skyscrapers

Being in Zurich is interesting because there’s virtually no tall buildings. I’d (without noticing it) gotten used to seeing the sky all the time, wherever I was. The sky here, is so blue, so often, too. When I went home, I spent some time at Telok Ayer, and had this moment where I felt a subtle sense of confusion that I couldn’t place. It was because I couldn’t really see the sky without looking up.

Zurich is nice. Too bad it’s so far from home, and I’m neither German/German-speaking nor an EU citizen. And my partner is not Swiss. Maybe I’ll be back one day, but probably only if Swiss immigration laws relax or I somehow achieve so much that they can justify giving me a work visa. We’ll see. It’s a nice place to be. Feels lot like the Singapore of Europe - ridiculously, painfully expensive, but things generally work and make sense. If I ever consider moving, I think Zurich will certainly be on my list.

It felt like a time skip

It was such an interesting experience coming home and almost experiencing something like a time skip. When you’re away, the people you care about continue living - life goes on. So when I come home and we talk, it feels… strange sometimes. It’s not the lack of familiarity, but just a strange lack of context to feelings and emotions of my friends and family that I find myself having to go “oh, what happened” or “oh, what do you mean”. Kinda interesting to feel.

On a similar note is conversations that are somewhat one-sided in that they have 1984713946 things to tell you, and normally, distrbuted over a couple months, the points they raise sound sane and make sense. All at once, they get overwhelming. The best example of this I got was “are y’all gonna get married?“. Lol.

Everyone is leaving, and I feel a little sad about that

One thing unique to this experience of mine, I suppose, is that I’m in my fourth year of university. All my friends are, too - and they’re graduating, but I’m not. I can’t help but feel a little sad that we can’t have that “last semester” experience together, or graduate together and take nice graduation pictures. It also doesn’t help that as I reflected on all those months ago - many of these friends are going abroad for grad school, and I won’t be seeing them for a while. Some of them, I think, I won’t see for an extra-long while, because they don’t hope to come back. So there’s that, too.

Two weeks left before London

Anyway, I’m back in Zurich now. It feels bittersweet that I only have two weeks left here - the friends I’ve made, while not deep, have been wonderful, and how I wish we could continue being in each other’s lives. It’s been nice knowing them, though, and for many of them I hope we stay in touch. It’d be a shame not to.

It does feel like an exciting time, though. My leg is healing quite nicely, in two weeks I’ll be in London - for all its cosmopolitan shit-hole-ness, I also grew up in a city, and it’s nice to be in one, sometimes. And in four weeks, I’ll get started at Palantir - and from the material they’ve shared with us, I’m really excited to get started.

Tomorrow morning, I leave for London. In the short amount of time I’ve spent here, I’ve gotten to know a surprising number of people pretty well. It’s a bit sad to go - to think that tomorrow, it’ll be a long while before I get to see some of these people again. But I suppose that’s the nature of these exchanges. It’s on me, and on them, I guess, to keep these ties alive. To visit and check in on each other every so often. I hope I’ll keep up my end of the deal. And plus, I suppose, it isn’t quite over - I’m going to be back in Zurich for 2 days for my final exams in late August. By then, many of them would have gone home - but for the few who haven’t, I think it’d be nice to grab lunch and catch up.

In the meantime, though, tomorrow is the start of a new chapter. I will try my best to be excited for it and keep my eyes on that. New challenges, new people, new things to work on. And if it is just half as good as my experience in Zurich, it’s going to be great. I hope it’ll be.

I’m going to miss Zurich. I’m going to miss Zurich a lot.

It’s been a week.

London is a bit more of a shithole compared to Zurich, but it’s so much more… vibrant? I get so many more “how are you’s” and random conversations with strangers, and it almost feels as if everyone has this big dream or weird side project or gig or hustle or whatever. It’s… interesting. I kinda like it. Summer extending nightfall to like 10pm also helps with the whole safety thing, I think. Messes with my sleep schedule, though.

Getting my own place, while a natural extension to staying in school-provided accomadation (as in Singapore, or in Zurich), feels so different. So much more responsibility, less benefits from scale (we clean everything ourselves, more expensive), but also so much more private. It feels kinda cool, actually. This new flat, while superbly located in the city centre, was in an absolutely filthy state when I moved in. Have you ever mopped a floor 16 times and it’s still dirty?? But with great thanks to my room mate for sticking through it with me, we’ve cleaned up the place real nice, and I think we’ve settled in pretty well.

It was a bit of a shame by partner and I couldn’t both find jobs here, because man, wouldn’t that just be so cool to do together? She did help me move in, though, and I helped her move out - she’s headed to New Haven for an internship, too. It was nice to have that little overlap in London.

Next week: a quick trip to Amsterdam, lots of studying, and then my first week of work the week after that! I’m really excited.

Amsterdam was an interesting and eye-opening (albeit exhausting) experience. My journey to Amsterdam began eventfully - my ride to the airport involved multiple train delays, my flight was delayed over an hour, and then I was almost kicked off said flight because it was overbooked. An on arrival, between visiting the red-light district, the constant smell of weed and the general degree of positivity and openess, I found Amsterdam eye-opening. It was pretty fun, too, in no small part because the city really has some really interesting sights and great food. My trip home was equally bumpy - it took me a total of 8 hours to get home. My hour long flight was bookended by a flight delay before departure, and a mix of hitch-hiking, cab-splitting and a long uber ride home on arrival as national rail strikes across the UK left me with no train home and competing with literally everyone else at that airport for a ride home. It was interesting.

Since coming back, I’ve spent some time just recovering, doing some studying and looking after myself. Oh, and Manchester United lost the FA cup final. Tonight, I watch Spiderverse 2, and tomorrow, I start work. I’m excited!

Very quickly, two and a half weeks have flown by. I have been onboarded, introduced to my team, and as of today, I’ve merged a small handful of PRs. It’s been tough. The first week wasn’t much - a ton of introductory material and socials, but it was really manageable. As expected, I guess. But the second week, the last 10 days, have been tough. A big company’s code base is miles apart from a plucky startup - layers, layers and more layers of abstraction, a horrific amount of tooling, and outdated (and often non-existent) documentation. The level of talent here is also higher, I think - where in other organizations I’ve typically, honestly, coasted by putting in 60-70% effort, here I’m barely keeping up putting in my all. Last week in particular, was really tough, because I felt frustrating unproductive, guiltily-burdensome and probably the stupidest I’ve felt in a long time. I’ve never thought of myself as an excellent developer, just maybe slighty above the average, but the last week has made me felt like I’m in the botto of the barrel.

At the end of last week, I found myself feeling overwhelmed and absolutely spent. So I took some quiet time (a very rare thing these days - so many meetings!) to reflect. And my thoughts can essentially be summarized as: don’t freeze, keep your ego at the door, ask lots of questions (shamelessly), be careful/polish your work more (I got 50+ comments on my first PR, lol). And this week, I’ve put a lot time into exactly those things - asking questions to unblock myself, trying to be careful with my work, and well, just not giving up. Today was - in the words of my friend Karlo, a fellow intern - the first day I’ve not felt like an absolute failure. He, too, like many of the other interns, has been struggling. It might sound dramatic, exaggerated - and it is - but I think it captures that feeling of exasperation and your ego being swiftly crushed by a new and unfamilliar challenge.

I don’t think I’m quite out of the woods yet - but fingers crossed the rest of the week is just as not-bad, and may god help me with managing my studies and final year thesis on top of these things.

It’s been a month, since then. Many ups and downs, I think. The good: I’m picking things up relatively well, my quality of work has been improving slowly but steadily, and I’m integrating quite nicely into the team. Some highlights: going go karting with the team and doing a fun little presentation we call hashtags (where you share topical things about yourself). The not so good: I can do better, and things are very busy at work. The bad: managing work alongside research ands studying for three exams is rough. I’ve more or less not had a single day that I’ve worked (as in, worked, worked on research, or studied) less than 12 hours since being to London. And I’m exhausted.

Took a break this evening, and I think I might just take some time off tomorrow to take a rest. I think I’m burning out, and I think I need that break.

I have an exam next Saturday, another one the Tuesday the week after that, and another one in Zurich at the end of August.

I’m trying my best to float! Fingers crossed.

I’m back in Zurich. About 11 hours ago, I finished my last exam for the semester, and with that, marked the end of what has been a very long (and fun, but definitely long) 8 months studying and working. After which, I rewarded myself with some strawberries and popped by the ETH AI Center to visit my thesis supervisor. I’ll be working with Clara Meister, who is a fantastic supervisor and generally awesome person.

I then spent the rest of the day chilling at a cafe and walking around Zurich, because it’ll probably be a while before I’m back. Zurich is pretty great, and I’ll miss it. Landing at the airport three days ago felt like a breath of fresh air - suddenly all was clean, functional, safe, and generally just… good - except the weather. Zurich had a heat wave and reached 35C for a couple days. And the last two days, despite crashing on a couch of a friend (who really hasn’t taken good care of her apartment, lol), it has been really nice being back here.

Tomorrow, I head off to Basel to begin a 5 day holiday with a friend around Switzerland and France. I’m really looking forward to this break. I’ve been working myself pretty hard for the last couple months, and I kinda need these few days just to rot and relax. Take stock. Before, of course, going back to the grind - application season is opening, as are grad school applications. I’m a little anxious about those, but I’m sure I’ll manage it fine.

I’ll probably spend some time at the end of all of this writing a bit more about my 8 months abroad. But the big TL;DR of it - it’s been hard, so, so much harder than I thought it would be, but also so much more enriching and worth it than I thought it would be, too. It’s been a good 8 months.

I’ve now been back for a week. Between the jet lag, scurrying around meeting old friends and getting my shit together for school and application season, it’s been a pretty busy week, and I haven’t quite had the time to reflect upon the past 8 months aborad. There are a lot of feelings and thoughts, and I’ll probably go through them at a later date. Especially because I’m starting my internship at Apple on Monday, and application season is upon us. But while things are busy (and only going to get more so), the warm weather - while sometimes insufferable - agrees with me. The food is familiar. My friends and family are here. I’m glad to be back.

My chapter abroad is now closed. Thanks for reading.