Chaos and Math
AI is a topic that has been surprisingly easy for me to understand. It must have something to do with the fact that I was at an IMO level when I was in high school.
CS felt like medicine to me, an area where you have to learn a variety of topics that do not necessarily make sense, whereas ML/AI feels like an area where everything makes sense. Whenever I dig deep into a concept or implementation in ML, it brings me back to the time when math was my sanctuary.
I grew up in a household with a lot of chaos. Looking back, it was the kind of environment where kids would go completely off track. The track I chose, luckily, was academics. I was a pretty average, maybe slightly above average, student throughout grade school. Starting in middle school, and definitely by the time I was in high school, I was competing in math nationally.
It was due to four factors. First, I had no doubt that I could learn whatever I put my mind to. Second, I strongly believed that financial independence was extremely important for a woman to have an independent life. Additionally, I believed that succeeding academically was a path to achieving that. And lastly, I noticed that when I focused on math or physics problems, I felt like I lived in a silent, clean, and perfect world far away from the chaos of daily life. I soothed myself by escaping from the beating, yelling, and bullying by my dad. To do well in high school math for college entrance exams in Japan, it is beneficial to understand college math. As a result, even without realizing it, my mind was absorbing college-level math by the time I started undergrad.
So, in some ways, I am thankful that I grew up in such an environment. I get to enjoy the world of math even 20+ years later because of the foundation I built at that time.