Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Zico Kolter

By the time he entered graduate school, Jeremy “Zico” Kolter had already presented at three top conferences in the fields of machine learning and data mining. While the other presenters were faculty and Ph.D. students at top computer science universities, Kolter was an undergraduate at Georgetown who had started out as a philosophy major.

Kolter, who presented work he did with Dr. Mark Maloof on an algorithm the two developed called Dynamic Weighted Majority, is now a Ph.D. student at Stanford, one of those very same top universities.

“Put simply, there’s no way I would have gotten in if not for the work I did while at Georgetown,” Kolter says. “To get into these programs, one really needs to do research as an undergraduate or master’s student.”

And research he did. During two and a half years of work with Maloof, Kolter co-authored three papers that laid the groundwork for the projects he continues to develop at Stanford.

“My Georgetown experience was invaluable in terms of preparing me for my work here,” he says. “I’m essentially doing the same thing here that I did at Georgetown—working on novel research in machine learning—and so the experience gave me a huge head start for the work here.”

Kolter stumbled upon his career path almost by accident when he took an introductory computer science class with Dr. Maloof. He attributes his course selection to “a little bit of luck,” since he wound up taking a class from Maloof, who sparked his interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Maloof started him on the path he’s on today, which he intends to take until he becomes a professor, like Maloof.

“Seeing as I did not even plan on majoring in computer science when I came to Georgetown, it’s difficult to overstate the impact of my work at Georgetown,” he says. “Essentially my work there forged my entire career path, and it is one that I absolutely love.”

It was more than just the research opportunities and the curriculum that Kolter says are beneficial to him as a Computer Science graduate student.

“People often ask me if, in hindsight, I would have rather attended a major computer science university. However, being at a large computer science department now, I can say with absolute certainty that I’m glad I went to Georgetown,” Kolter says. “At Stanford, professors are more than willing to work with undergraduates, but they have very little time to devote to them, since they are incredibly busy. With Mark, however, I was able to work very closely with a faculty member, and learn a lot about the nuances of writing papers, designing experiments, etc., that I never would have learned had I come to Stanford.”

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