An Unexpected Long Weekend—a Much Needed Break

In the past week, I enjoyed a four-day weekend (thanks to the snow), researched a new type of fingerprint, and made some progress on my model. Although I didn’t work as much on the code of my model, I studied quite a bit for USNCO over the long weekend in an attempt to make up for my procrastination. When I wasn’t studying, I spent lots of time with my friends and some in the Texas snow. I even helped build a small snowman--only part of the reason this was one of the most fun weekends I'd had in a while. Hopefully competing in Chemistry Olympiad will make up for the fact that I expected to study more chemistry and less computer science through my projects. For my research assessment this week, I studied Kier and Hall’s electrotopological atom indices, which I can hopefully apply to my toxicity prediction model. On my mentor visit, I’m glad I got to meet Professor Tao, who invited the possibility of me helping with his research group’s work next year. Also, thanks to my model development combining a GCN and XGBoost, and its performance (good enough to secure #1 on the leaderboard), Hao explained that there was a better likelihood of my being able to write a paper. This is exciting for me and is probably my biggest goal for the year. I’m really looking forward to continuing my work and presenting at Research Showcase.