meaning of life

I believe everyone experiences pivotal moments that shape the course of their life. I wanted to record some of mine on this page. More reflections are also written in my AI4Science blog.

Phase of Confusion and Existential Crisis (~High School)

Since my school days, I’ve been fascinated by startups and technology, which led me to connect with a variety of professionals in the field. I was going through an existential crisis and wanted to find an answer—or at least a hint. I felt that just studying textbook theories for a few more years wouldn’t resolve this, so I actively sought advice from people in industry.

In middle school, I was so eager to meet startup founders that I would contact their customer service departments if I couldn’t find their email addresses—just to ask whether what I was learning in school was actually useful and applicable in the real world. Thankfully, many kind people offered me invaluable advice, which helped me partially resolve my internal conflict.

I wanted to become a useful person, so I explored my interests through various small projects and experiences across diverse fields. I created a chatbot for company business accounts, developed games and apps, worked as a marketing intern at an advertising company, used my language skills in the EdTech sector, explored chemical industry tech by working at a chemical company, worked on robot vision side project, and participated in Kaggle competitions. I even explored virtual fitting in the fashion industry. Looking back, it seems like I tried a bit of everything in seemingly unrelated fields. I did this because I wasn’t sure what I liked—so I explored widely (and I’m still exploring).

Korean Army (2021 ~ 2023)

Still uncertain, I joined the Korean Army. I had plenty of time to ponder life—away from distractions and social media, with limited screen time. It was the first time I was free from all societal expectations and could study out of pure curiosity and joy. I started studying without deadlines or advisors, diving into algorithms and web development with React.js. I also read randomly—over 80 books during service—on topics ranging from marketing, environmental science, and finance to literature, philosophy/religion, psychology, and technology. I often read each book twice. Some personal favorites: The New Map by Daniel Yergin, Demian by Hermann Hesse, Quiet by Susan Cain, The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans, and Writer’s Lesson by Fumitake Koga.

Later, I began studying machine learning through Stanford’s CS231N. I was fortunate to meet a great friend in the bunk next to mine, who was also studying computer science at SNU. We studied for two hours every day in the computer lab and would whisper discussions in the bathroom to avoid disturbing others during sleep. Questions like: “Why is the dimension after convolution like that?” or “How are they even computing a gradient over an entire matrix?” I’ll never forget those bathroom debates.

We also participated in the military AI competition, often sneaking into the lab to train our models (only when we didn’t have important duties the next day—I promise). We were simply thrilled to have the opportunity to code during service. During night duty, I would print out research papers I didn’t understand—on Transformers, BERT, RNNs, DistilBERT, and more. Years later at Berkeley, all of that effort paid off.

AI4Science

After returning to Berkeley, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to pursue. I enjoyed working on machine learning but didn’t know which direction to take. A good friend, Samarth Jajoo from Machine Learning @ Berkeley, introduced me to CryoDRGN from Ellen Zhong’s group—it reconstructs cryo-EM structures from images. There was also Seyone who gave me many advices along with Samarth.

Very fortunately, just a week after I got interested in BioML, Demis Hassabis (this was before he won the Nobel Prize) and Ellen Zhong both visited Berkeley to give a talk. Something clicked inside me, and I knew this was finally it - after years of search.

Amidst this, I found a strong attraction to applying AI in the natural sciences and began research and projects related to genomics and biology.

In high school, I had distanced myself from biology, so I had a lot to catch up on. To compensate, I attended every relevant seminar I could find, persistently asked questions to professors, postdocs, and biology-major friends. I’m incredibly grateful to them. Thanks to their help, I quickly built up the minimal required knowledge. I read papers I didn’t fully understand, looking up each part to learn deeply (though I still have a long way to go).