Pedro (Zeyang) Yu, MPS ’25, never gives up. His personal mantra is tattooed above his heart. It reads, “It’s not over until I win.”
This mantra served him as a 17-year-old Chinese native new to the United States and living with a beloved host family. He lived it through high school in Buffalo, New York – the international kid with passable English who excelled academically, made friends, got elected student council president, and worked his way onto the varsity soccer team. And he leaned on it while pushing through 1,005 (and counting) rejection emails to jobs he applied for in the last year – “I just got another last week,” he said – before landing a position as a machine learning engineer at TikTok this past summer.
Despite the challenges, Yu has enjoyed the adventure thus far.
“I enjoy my life,” Yu said from his Silicon Valley apartment, flanked by his two cats, Coca and Cola. “Life is really short, so how about we go through the day in a really happy mood?”
Yu brought this resolute yet light spirit to Cornell’s Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in Information Science, a rigorous, two- to three-semester program that prepares students for successful careers in the tech industry. After high school in blustery Buffalo, Yu jumped to the West Coast, where he received his undergraduate degree in data science from the University of California, San Diego. But with graduate school in mind, Yu felt sunny SoCal was too comfortable and too beautiful an environment for deep learning. He read online about Cornell’s MPS in Information Science and felt the program would help him develop a career mindset and give him the boost he needed to land a job in tech. And absent consistently perfect weather, beaches, and daily surfing sessions, Ithaca offered Yu a perfect setting to focus.
In his graduate year in the MPS program, Yu dedicated himself to honing skills in machine learning (ML), taking ML-specific courses in the Data Science focus area and volunteering in the lab of K. Max Zhang, the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering, for more hands-on work in artificial intelligence outside of class.
The lab proved ideal for intensive, self-directed learning and collaboration with brilliant Ph.D. students, he said.
“Learning from other people is always good, but you learn fastest by learning from your own mistakes,” he said. “Yet that kind of learning was only part of the journey for me. Because the MPS is just one year, networking and practicing my communication skills were also huge.”
Finding a job proved herculean for Yu. He began applying for jobs as soon as he arrived at Cornell last fall. By October, he already amassed upwards of 300 rejection emails. Never give up? Even Yu had his limits.
Frustrated and feeling down, he visited Rebecca Salk, career services advisor and a go-to resource for MPS students in information science, who, seeing his tireless effort, encouraged him to take some time off from applying to jobs. “Give yourself one month to breathe,” Yu recalled Salk saying.
“So, for one month – after school, after I finished my homework – I’d call a couple of friends, get on Discord, and play League of Legends the whole night,” he said, laughing. “I got my rank [in the game] from gold to diamond. After a month, I had a better mindset.”
