Sagnik Anupam

What’ve you enjoyed most about your area of study? Was there a particular discovery, new skill or way of thinking, or insight that you found especially valuable? Please share an example from your favorite class or experience.

As a literature (film focus) minor, I think that the most important technique I learned during my literature classes was learning to think in terms of different frameworks and identifying how different schools of thought would analyze or tackle a specific question. I think my favorite exercise in this method was analyzing the text of fairytales in 21L.451 (Literary Theory) and understanding how theorists like Derrida or Levi-Strauss would interpret it.

How does the knowledge from this field, or your interest in it, combine with your other major or minor studies at MIT?

As a double-major in computer science and mathematics, I believe that using frameworks in literary analysis helped me understand how diverse frameworks and schools of thought similarly existed in cutting-edge technical research papers as well. Different frameworks in computer science often use different subsets of techniques as well as a different “language” to communicate their ideas. I learned to look for clues about the frameworks different authors were using in the technical papers I was reading in a similar manner to how I tried to infer the school of thought specific critics and theorists belonged to while reading their papers.

An MIT education includes study in the scientific, technical, social science, arts, and humanities fields. How do you think that wide range of knowledge and perspectives will be valuable to you – for your career success and for your enjoyment of life?

I think that alongside developing my technical skills, MIT taught me a lot about film appreciation and the evolution of movements in literature and film. This has helped me think more critically about the media I consume, and has expanded my tastes across a wide range of media. In terms of my career, I think that repeatedly having to write complex arguments for a wide range of audiences, both in my STEM CI-M classes as well as my HASS classes, has helped me grow as a STEM communicator and improved the quality of my overall research communication.

What are your plans for the future?

I currently plan on pursuing my PhD in Computer and Information Science, studying the intersection of programming languages and machine learning at the University of Pennsylvania this fall.