June 20, 2025
Day 19 – Not So 'Happy Maroon Friday'
What I Learned
We started the day with a meeting with Pelumi, with our high school teacher present. Pelumi will not be in the lab next week due to a work conference, so he briefed us on next week’s goals beforehand. At the end of the meeting, I raised a few concerns regarding my team members. Their progress, although genuine, doesn’t seem very impactful. I feel like they are blindly changing hyperparameters, optimizers, and layers without fully understanding their actual purpose and effect. After this, I worked on coding my ensemble codebase from scratch. This time, I added DenseNet on top of the previous configuration. Coding this new model took a long time, with a lot of added callback functions. At around 3:45, I started working on my slides, and Pelumi came to review them. Then we all sat down to make the weekly video presentation.
Blockers
No issues faced.
Reflection
The day went okay. I am having some doubts about my team members, which I feel I can’t talk about without being antagonized or misinterpreted as acting bossy or superior. Other than that, I was just working on my assigned task. Training this ensemble model will take a while—well beyond 5 PM, in fact—so I decided to leave the PC running and check the final results on Monday.