For the past year or so, I have been working on my thesis project to obtain my bachelor's degree. Without a doubt, there are countless occasions where I stopped to ponder about the goal of writing my thesis. Sure, it should be the culmination of all the theories I learn during my time as a student here. But, I don't think that theses captures the essence of one's multi-year academic work, at least not for me.

You see, as an IT student, I have the whole world to research and explore in my thesis, from developing the next generation post-quantum cryptosystem to identifying birds from its sound. Despite my somewhat okay background in backend development, I decided to explore something unknown for me at the time: deep learning. I made this decision around the end of 2023, where LLMs are still mundane and AI tools are few and far between. I aim to set myself apart and create something I can admire.

Fast forward to the present, I finished my deep learning model that analyze causes of depression from social media texts, with countless LLMs out there that can do that plus countless other things...

I'm not saying that I created something useless, it's just that I created something less useful and less groundbreaking that I originally hoped. Maybe I set my expectations too high, but that's something I'd have to swallow now. Many people treated bachelor thesis as a mere ticket out of the school, and they're probably right. Overcomplicating your bachelor research with wild expectations can ruin your spirit.

Going back to my point about culmination of all the theories, my thesis doesn't even scratch the surface of what I'd call "all of the things i learn". I didn't even learn anything much about deep learning here. I mostly learn it all by myself from journals, going through other people's code from Kaggle, and HuggingFace docs. I'd be better off making a hospital management system or something and that would've represented my studies better.

Wait, I've already made one of those before for a final semester assignment! Does it mean that my finals did better at representing my work as a student than my thesis? That's the frustating thing that I've been thinking lately. If my thesis is neither groundbreaking nor representative, then what for?

But then again, I probably did that to myself. I was too focused on planning something great, not something that works, for something that's being graded based on how it works or not. I think that concludes my rant. Although I get stressed sometimes, I gradually accept them as how they are.

My thesis might be trash, but it's my trash and I'm incredibly proud of it.