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Summarising the post in a sentence “It was hard, but totally worth it!”. In December 2020, I graduated with masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from CMU. I completed the program in three semester from August 2019 to December 2020, in which I did 9 courses (7 PhD level). My research focused on topics in speech, specifically audio understanding and voice analysis and was advised by Prof. Bhiksha Raj and Prof. Rita Singh at MLSP.

I had great learning opportunities at CMU and my research resulted in three publications (two ICASSP, one INTERSPEECH). If I have to pick the most important thing I learned at CMU from the program itself or from faculty and my amazing peers is about how to approach and think about hard problems. And there are plenty of hard problems that you get to tackle at CMU. For me this involved: projects on audio understanding, working with speech scientists to tackle COVID-19, delivering research talk at MIT SLS group, a summer internship at Microsoft, and much more. Though not everything was great all the time, I had months where nothing seemed to work and I was able to make no headway in my research. Combine this with being thousands of miles away from your family. Those months taught me a lot about patience and perseverance and made me firmly believe that research can be incredibly satisfying if you have the right mindset.

Keeping this short, in all I had a great, fun and exciting time at CMU!