Final Entry
After a few days of sudden bouts of tiredness and random hunger pangs from jet lag (strangely, Ryoma’s actual sleep pattern adjusted quickly), Ryoma fully recovered from the jet lag and had the following thoughts.
Arrival back to America, at Atlanta [on Aug 11].
Cultural
Despite being told to enjoy his stay by his cohort, his advisor, and Dr. Kim, Ryoma did not take enough time to savor what Korea has to offer as he was a bit preoccupied by his work. He had indeed visited Daejeon to scale its heights, visited Seoul’s palaces and museums to learn of Korea’s history, and visited Busan to see more of Korea’s urban vibrancy, but he still did not see the natural beauty of Jeju, nor did he immerse himself in Korea’s traditions in Jeonju. Ryoma still had things to do there, but cannot act on them for years- or whenever he decides to return, if ever.
Scientific
While he did not enjoy Korea as much as he could have, the intellectual journey Ryoma had in Korea was, of course, tremendously satisfying. Wanting to do work in visual SLAM, his training before his internship had him learning about convolutional neural networks, then toward the machine vision that allowed it. However, his work led to several unexpected but exciting detours into the inner workings of ROS, robotic simulation, and eventually shader coding. The twists and turns of his scientific exploration made Ryoma far more skilled in robotics. But more importantly, the sheer diversity of subjects he had to study taught him to learn how to learn.
Final Notes
While Ryoma did not quite get everything he wanted, he was nevertheless impressed by the country. As he already has formed experiences, developed skills, and built relationships in Seoul National University, he may attend graduate school- provided that he can overcome the funding problems that come with being in a foreign university. Ryoma may fulfill his vow to return.
