Derek Wan

Graduate Student, Software Engineer, Researcher, Voxel Artist, Pianist

About

Hi There! I'm Derek. I'll make this quick.

If you are a

Recruiter / Hiring Manager
See my Experience section and LinkedIn (linked above).

Student
- If you're not in 61A but found my site because you were Googling for premed course notes, the notes / practice questions I wrote for MCB 102, MCB 160, Chem 1A, and Chem 3A are below on this page.
- If you're in 61A, I no longer teach, but you can find some of my past YouTube walkthroughs on the 61A Departmental channel and some past worksheets Sean and I wrote here: link
- I'm also always down to chat with prospective / early Berkeley students who are feeling a bit lost. Shoot me an email and we can set up a meeting, or I can just answer your questions over email.

Curious Lurker
- See these interesting links: http://bit.ly/GG_Raccoons and bit.ly/chickenSoupCat .
- Email me directly if you would like to buy an iPhone 6 Plus autographed by Craig Federighi: bit.ly/federighi

Experience

  • Education

  • University of California, Berkeley

    - Master's student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
    - Research focus is in Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, specifically data-free learning / knowledge distillation

  • University of California, Berkeley

    - Bachelor's in Computer Science
    - Graduated top of my class with Highest Distinction / summa cum laude (3.963 GPA)

  • Professional Experience

  • DocuSign

    - Infrastructure / Storage software engineer
    - Building a cloud service to provide secure, audited access to sensitive process dumps and ETW traces from production and test machines, to be used by ~1000 engineers. Working primarily across the .NET / Azure tech stack

  • ThoughtSpot

    - Engineering intern on the eNLite natural language processing team
    - Worked on a patened NLP system and increased tests from 1,000 to 80,000 while reducing overall evaluation time by > 10-fold by improving caching / load balancing logic. Worked primarily with Python, Protobuf, Jenkins, Groovy, and C++.

  • UC Berkeley College of Engineering

    - Undergraduate and graduate student instructor for CS 61A, which was named one of the top 5 computer science courses in the nation
    - Recipient of the 2020 EECS Distinguished GSI Award, which is given to the top instructor out of ~700 in the department each year
    - Consistently maintained one of the highest ratings in the EECS department from students across 8 semesters of teaching ~2000 students a semester.

  • Miscellaneous

  • Microsoft Imagine Cup

    Part of Team Boomereang, which won second place in the US Imagine cup, advanced to World Finals out of 40,000+ entrants from 200+ countries, and won accolades for Big Data / IOT. See here: link 1, link 2, and link 3

  • USA Biology Olympiad

    Placed among the top 500 students in the USA in the 2015 USABO competition

  • DuPont Challenge

    One of 33 winners selected from a pool of 10,000+ international essay submissions

  • USA Swimming

    - One of the fastest swimmers in the country for the 2009-2010 season. National age group rankings: 100 back (25th), 50 free (16th), 100 free (21st), 200 breast (25th)
    - Represented the USA at the 2010 North American Challenge Cup
    - Overall third-place finisher in the 2014 Navy SEAL Challenge
    - 2015 American Short Course Championships finalist in the 100 backstroke
    - 2x CIF champion in 2015 and 2016

Digital Art

I build 3D voxel art with MagicaVoxel.


Miscellaneous Work

Here is a hodgepodge of things I've worked on over the years.

Contact

Connect with me!
If you'd like to talk, don't hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn!