This article is about the author’s experience of pursuing a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The author was interested in machine learning and understanding the mathematics behind data models. UCLA was one of the top colleges on the author’s application list and they were awed by the different labs on campus that were specialising in various domains of machine learning research. The author was able to choose from a variety of courses such as natural language processing, machine learning, data science, computer vision and software engineering.