Inspired by the CV of failures project, I thought of doing something similar both as an academic or as a person. I found reading other people’s CVs of failures quite inspiring because it gives insights into how many times even the most successful people fail. For a large part of my life, my life has been a series of failures too. I hope this list could encourage others when they are struggling and remind me that it is ok to fail. All you need to do is to fail, evaluate and try again next time.
Papers
- 2 papers at Neurips: 2019, 2021
- 1 paper withdrawn from ICLR: 2021
Fellowships & Scholarship
- NVIDIA Academic Hardware Grant Program, 2022
- Teaching and research scholarship, Oriel College: 2021
- IBM PhD fellowship: 2020
- Alan Turing fellowship: 2019
- Oxford-China scholarship: 2019
- Gates Cambridge Scholar: 2019
- Chinese LGBTQ scholarship: 2019
College & Grad school admissions
I applied to grad school two times. The first time I was aiming at neuroscience, but I got turned away by all but one school. The second time, I only applied to two, and I got into one of them:
- Stanford ICME master
- Harvard neuroscience
- Upenn neuroscience
- ETHz Neural Systems and Computation
- Cambridge Dphil in Psychology
For my undergraduate, this list is much longer. I didn’t get into all of the 10+ schools that I applied to but one. Unlike other people, I didn’t have to choose.
- Stanford
- Harvard
- Brown
- Dartmouth
- Bowdoin
- Hong Kong University
There are a few other places that I applied to but couldn’t remember.
Internships
I have applied to most medium-big tech firms numerous times almost every year but didn’t get many offers in return. I am going to list a few representative ones that I have interviewed with:
Facebook (3 times), Google (many times), Yelp 1 time, Twitter (had to withdraw due to no visa sponsorship even after the offer stage), and Landing.AI.
Misc
Yeah, I also failed the Oxford tennis varsity try out twice. Next year is my last chance.