My Journey Learning AI, and What’s Next

A reflection on my journey through AI starting at age 16, and what my plans are going forward

Image from Unsplash by Matt Duncan

Since I’m graduating high school this week, I’ve been in a reflective mood. I wanted to write a lot on Medium this last semester, but I ended up deciding not to until now. Writing on Medium about AI has been a big part of my journey through AI—it’s helped me collect my thoughts and interact to a global audience. I wrote my first article about 2 years ago, which was quite a poor article in retrospect. In this article, I’d like to discuss how I was introduced to AI, what I persevered through, and why I decided to pursue this field. More importantly, I hope my story inspires younger students and can be a guide for them, as I’ve received many messages/emails asking how I became successful in this field. Hopefully, you find this article helpful, inspiring, or an interesting read.

How it Started

I first got involved with AI around my 16th birthday, or my sophomore year of high school. I wrote about the following story in my college essays, most notably my personal statement. These events meant a lot to my academic career, which is why I decided to make it the focal point of my application’s narrative.

While I started an AI project early in sophomore year, I really picked it up when quarantine first started. I was working on a simple skin cancer diagnosis algorithm, a common project to begin with. From this one project, I had “mastered” AI — but only perceptually. No matter who inquired about my work, I presented the same complex explanations I’d meticulously rehearsed. Whether what I said was correct became an afterthought — the show must go on. I’d received too many encore requests.

But finally, it caught up to me. One day while chatting with friends, I was asked about the project. In response to my friend, I did what I always did. I performed my routine — I confidently rambled about convolutional layers, loss functions, architectures, and similar jargon I didn’t remotely get. He didn’t know AI, so I didn’t expect much of a challenge. Surprisingly, he followed with rapid-fire questions — “What’s a convolution?” “What’s a loss function?” “What’s a U-Net?” I was doomed. Attempting to reply, I stuttered and…