Today was my third day of my CS PhD career. A few highlights:
On my first day I managed to get mildly told off by Fei-Fei Li herself for accidentally talking too loud in a hallway while a talk was happening in an adjacent hallway. Oops. (and yes yes there goes my anonymity. Like Scott Alexander, I’m going to try to stay non-googleable here but it’s fine for people to be able to figure out who I am.)
At one point yesterday I opened the door to my office (which I share with three other PhD students) to find a horde of Japanese visitors right outside. I've seen at least two large groups of Chinese visitors touring the AI lab areas, once with a live Chinese-English interpreter. At MIT I was used to having to duck in order to not accidentally photobomb Asian tourist photos, but people never actually specifically visited my lab or anything. (I guess AI really is getting a lot of hype these days...)
On a related note, a lot of my fellow PhD students are from China, which is making me very tempted to try to learn Mandarin.
I thought the free food barrage would end after orientation week, but today I had both lunch and dinner covered. Yum.