Goodbye 2023! Hello 2024!
Hey! Nice to see you back here. I'm Keshav, a student working with A.I! If you are just discovering me, I hope you find something within this article that you can relate to or find interesting!
I ended November off practising mindsets, diving deeper into my AI journey and building a lot of really cool projects! Since then, I have been working on passion projects and being more grateful for what I have.
December was a crazy month for me!
I was loaded with so many tests, final culminating tasks, and even some small musical performances at my school. I was pretty busy, however I had no idea how busy I was about to get!
I walked into an opportunity that was too hard to resist, Google had a marketing issue and students such as myself were asked to present solutions to solve the issue. Alongside my committed team of hard workers: Jasmeet, Jiya, Florence, and Sara; we were able to come in the top 5 teams in Toronto! This challenge was no joke, my team members and I met every single day (except Tuesday…) for 3 weeks straight! We had a very rough start, scrapping over 7 ideas we had. Then we finally struck gold! Google was having an issue with their marketing with Google Ads. We noticed that their interface could use some work and crafted a personalized Ad Agent that could make the convoluted Google Ads platform into something more business-friendly! Check out our Google slide pitch here!
January
January came, 2023 was over, and 2024 had started! (Funnily enough, this was the first year I stayed up to greet the new year!) I needed to make the most out of 2024 and live up to the many ambitions I had. As you may also know, January is exam season for many high schoolers so that was also on my mind. With many pressures around me, I chose to journal all my thoughts and take each day one step at a time. Which allowed me to refocus and shift my thoughts into what mattered. I would recommend checking out Notion to write your thoughts or organize your life better better. Note that there is a paywall with the free version :)
I had two main projects I worked on throughout January: A Rube Goldberg Chocolate Dispenser, and a chrome extension to aid the studying habits of students!
The Rube Goldberg machine is a machine that has a series of events that all link to each other. It is much like the domino effect. The whole project was very fun to build, but I have to admit there were moments when it was very frustrating to build since the whole thing needed to work perfectly. Regardless, my group and I after hundreds of failed attempts got it working and we were ecstatic! Check it out here!
The other project I am working on is a Chrome extension to make the lives of students easier. I realized shortly that I underestimated how hard it would be to make. So for the past few weeks, I have been learning little by little about image recognition models, and text-to-generation models, all of which can be found on HuggingFace(An AI Community) for free!
Lastly, I have been reading a book called The Handmaid’s Tale, it is not an easy read but I am picking back up my passion for reading again!
Main Takeaways from December and January:
Take each day one at a time, and schedule your time efficiently
Express your emotions in the form of writing and keep a level head
Resilience is key, never give up on something you believe in
Time goes by fast! Make sure to invest time into yourself every day!