Sean Meng
Can you give an introduction, with your year, major, and a fun fact about yourself?
My name is Sean Meng. I'm a senior, I'm graduating in a few weeks, and it's pretty exciting. I'm an EECS major. Hometown is San Jose, California, about an hour south of Berkeley. And fun fact, I really like spicy food.
Congrats on almost graduating! What are your plans post-grad?
Thanks. I'm going to be joining Hudson River Trading as a software developer in a few months.
How did you choose your major?
I was really interested in computers when I was applying to college. Initially, when I came into Berkeley, I was really interested in robotics, and maybe even doing a PhD. So I think the combination of EE and CS sounded like a good fit for me. But I've gradually moved, I think, as many people do, from hardware, more to software at college.
What are your hobbies and interests?
I really like playing board games. I organize some board games with some of my friends. I'm also into rock climbing, before COVID. I think it's a very interesting combination of physical strength and also mental strength like puzzle solving.
What are your favorite TV shows or movies?
I think my two favorite TV shows are Rick and Morty and Archer.
You've touched upon this a bit already, but can you go more in-depth about your professional interests? What is your professional experience and how did you get interested in those fields?
I think my main professional interest right now is just software development, but also very, like performance related software. So right now I'm taking CS 164, which is compilers. I think that's pretty tough, but also very interesting. In terms of my experience, I think I started off working in the research lab, because I thought I wanted to do a PhD. But then, I gradually realized that wasn't the best fit for me. And it was also just really hard. [laughs] I didn't want to do it. So I started orienting myself more towards software engineering. I did an internship at first Databricks, which is a software as a service, big data company. Then I worked at Uber for a summer. Then my final internship was at Hudson River Trading, and I'm going back there as a new grad.
Are you involved in any other organizations on campus?
I'm involved in CSUA. And I've been involved with other organizations in the past. But CSUA is my main other obligation.
Why did you decide to join SAAS?
I think there was a period of time in which I was pretty interested in statistics as a career choice. Not so much anymore career-wise, but I'm still very interested in the subject. I was also planning on taking a stats class, and I wanted to know other people to take it with.
What committees have you been on, and what did you do and learn in each one?
I've only been on the Education Committee. It's been a pretty fun experience overall. I think the first semester I was there, I participated in two lectures. And that was after COVID, though, and I think part of the hard part about that was learning to speak to a camera, because that's a very different skill than live lecturing in that I find I'm very perfectionist. I just retake a lot of different sections of the lecture because I feel like there was this one small mistake I made. I think it's kind of hard to explain, but I think a lot of people deal with that. This semester, I'm one of the co-directors, and I help run the meetings. And also, I'm helping to organize the project that we're hosting.
What did you like about SAAS that made you want to stay in the club, especially to co-direct the Education committee?
I think it was really rewarding getting to teach people about statistics, and it's a very rich field. I haven't taken very many stats classes; most of the stats I've taken are in the EECS department, classes like 126 and 189. And those classes, I think, gave me a slightly different perspective, and I wanted to share that with members.
What would you say your proudest accomplishment in SAAS is?
I'd say it's getting the project out without f*cking up. There were a lot of ideas that we had, some of them were pretty bad. Some of them were less bad; we managed to pick the less bad one.
Could you talk a bit about that project?
At the end of every semester, we host projects, where we combine other topics that we've covered before into just a single project that CX does. And I think the trick is a balancing act between making it difficult enough so that it's not trivial. We don't want to just like, do something that we've done in class exactly, and instead give a different backstory to it. But we also want to make it not so hard that people have to be like PhD students to really get something out of it, and it's like striking that balance. I think another part of it is also coming up with a genre or backstory that people can find useful. So this year, we're doing predicting real estate prices, and I guess part of the motivation was, you know, we're going to be renting or buying pretty soon in the future as we move on, and giving people the ability to kind of reason about what makes property expensive or cheap would be useful.
How has SAAS helped you with your career and professional development?
I think it's helped me explain things better, and just kind of use a filter between my thoughts and my speech, to make it more coherent and understandable. I think that's a really important skill that people have to develop. And, you know, education, obviously, these are pretty tough concepts, and we have to present our ideas in an understandable way for people who haven't really spent a lot of time with the material. I think in the past, I struggled with this a lot. Getting to practice this skill, it's definitely made me a more organic person. I remember there was a specific moment in high school where I had a bunch of ideas, I think it was in AP Chemistry. And my teacher was like, I think you have a lot of ideas, and you're just saying each one of them as they come into your head, and it's making it kind of hard to understand. I think you should add a filter, so that you can project only a subset of those ideas in a way that's understandable, and that reinforces a bigger theme that you're trying to point out. So I've been working on it. It's actually a lot harder than it sounds.
Of the three SAAS values of community, exploration, and mentorship, can you choose one and explain what it means to you?
I pick mentorship. Obviously, as one of the co-directors, I want to pass on the knowledge and skills of the organization and how things are run logistically onto the next SAAS students, although that has been a lot harder to do with COVID. But I also think that there's a lot of other information, and I guess, more latent things that aren't super obvious, that are part of the Berkeley experience that I've had to realize, without anyone telling me explicitly about this. I think the most obvious example is, I remember as a freshman, I thought that, you know, obviously, EECS majors have like, some stereotype. And I thought it was my role to embody that stereotype. And looking back, obviously, I'm like, kind of cringe. But I think just observing underclassmen, and if they make mistakes, like I have in the past, maybe perhaps not realizing that you can become your own person, giving them friendly advice.
How do you feel things have changed being in a remote setting, in regards to both SAAS specifically as well as school and life in general?
I think it's a lot harder. Because I find that a lot of my interactions at Berkeley are just stuff like water cooler talk, like you know, at work, someone just goes to the water cooler, and gets a cup of water. And at the same time, somebody else comes in, they start a conversation that none of those two people would have spent, like the energy to start a conversation with a random person, but since they're already there, might as well talk. And that happened a lot, especially, when I would be at a club meeting, someone would be sitting next to me and just chatting. Now, the barrier for social interaction is much higher in that, like for this meeting to happen, both of us had to consciously schedule it. I guess in summary, there are a lot of interactions that don't have any explicit purpose, but I think they add a little bit of value to our college experience. And that value really adds up across hundreds of interactions a semester.
What is your favorite SAAS memory?
I went to a board game night, and then I was also cooking pasta. We were playing Avalon and then I briefly left the room so that I could check on my pasta. And then people thought that I made that as a fake excuse so that I could avoid confrontation. Then they gradually came to a consensus that I was evil, but I was not evil, so that was unfortunate.
What is your favorite class you've taken at Berkeley?
I would say it's EECS 126. Although I'm pretty biased in that I teach the class right now. But I think it's a very interesting combination of very hard theory problems, but also having coding projects in labs, to put those into practice, and forcing people to understand what those mean.
How has your teaching experience been, and do you have any advice for people who might want to become a GSI?
I think my advice would be being a GSI is a really good experience, but being a GSI, for like, more than two semesters can get kind of tedious. Because I'm in my third semester now, and I taught this stuff like two semesters, two times already, and it's a little boring. And a lot of the work in being a GSI is also very logistical, like you have to write exam problems, grade exams. And then, there's always one person that spams like, regrade requests and everything; they don't like that they didn't know how to solve the problem.
I appreciate the realistic response! Continuing on the topic of teaching, who is your favorite Berkeley professor?
I'd say it's Professor Ramchandran. He taught EECS 126. He wasn't like one of those professors that tried too hard to be your friend; I'm not sure if you met one of those professors before, but some professors are just very overly friendly. He's also very easy to follow, and it's very easy to see him in office hours and stuff like that. So it's a nice balance.
Do you have a favorite spot on campus that you think more people should know about?
I would say the Li Ka Shing part of Berkeley, and Genetics and Plant Bio. There's also a restaurant there; I forgot its name, but it's pretty good. But that general area of campus I think, is like the most aesthetically pleasing out of any spot on campus. And it's also not super hard to get a seat there. I think it's pretty underrated. Maybe because it's far away from everything.
What do you think the ugliest building on campus is?
Evans, it has to be Evans. Actually, no, I vote for Cory instead. It looks like a prison. Like a 1960s dystopian, like Soviet prison.
What is your favorite library on campus?
I think it's the East Asian library. It's very aesthetically pleasing.
What is your favorite restaurant in Berkeley?
I'd say it's Imm Thai. I go there a lot.
What is your favorite Berkeley memory?
Honestly, my favorite Berkeley memory is probably just the times when me and like five of my friends would just hang out at one of our apartments and just talk until like, 4am in the morning. Just simple things like that. It's not particularly memorable, like I can't tell you what date it happened. It's not like graduating high school or something, like, important in my life. But it's my favorite memory in that it was very simple.