My First Research Internship!

15 Jun 1985 -

My First Research Internship

“Research is 1% inspiration, 99% misinterpreting your advisor’s instructions.”
— Me, probably

I’m so excited to share that I’ve just completed my very first research internship!
The lab was working on early neural networks — incredible stuff that may one day change the world.

My Assignment

• Calibrate some sensors
• Collect experimental data
• Not blow anything up

The Reality

Instead, I:

1. Calibrated the sensors backwards (we now have a beautiful dataset of negative weights)
2. Spilled coffee on a logbook from 1979 (sorry, future historians!)
3. Accidentally trained the model to predict the lunch menu instead of digits

# What the network actually learned
>>> model.predict("input: Monday")
"output: Meatloaf"

Lessons Learned

Neural networks are fascinating

Coffee is not a good coolant

Advisors appreciate enthusiasm… up to a point

Still, I like to think my contribution was valuable. After all, someone had to discover that neural networks can dream of meatloaf.