What I think about
College allows you time to spend on things you wouldn't usually get to do. While physical activity and not living under a rock are inarguably essential to functioning in society, I still derive a lot of joy from learning, reading, and thinking about things. Here is a list of things I'm spending most of my time thinking about:
Reinforcement Learning: This is one of the things I know least about right now, however; it's what I'm most excited to learn more about. From what I've read, there's been a slowdown in the progress made after the 2013 Atari paper, following which companies like DeepMind and OpenAI went all in, with not much breakthrough, after which all the hype went to Deep Learning. Echoing what Karpathy said, once we're able to convincingly achieve production-grade RL on an open domain at scale, it may very well be the next step to achieving general- domain intelligence in the way current LLMs lack.
Computational Biology: Apart from the current research I'm doing, which is integrating large language models to further analysis of single-cell transcriptomic data, I'm very excited to see the pace at which this field has been progressing, in particular with noninvasive neural engineering and gene editing via foundational models. I don't see myself going down this route in particular, but it might change, and it's probably going to be fun to keep an eye on anyway.
Relationships: This is probably the only non-technical thing on my list, however, I think it's just as important to be prioritizing, as I'd rather not die alone. However, there isn't a curriculum for this, or any one way going about this. In particular, what works for me is reading blogs—shoutout to Ava, Jacob, and my friends IRL!