Hi! My name is Amelia. Most people call me Bug though. I'm also known by the moniker Saturday. I am raising funds, chiefly, to pay for the semester registration fees to defend my completed dissertation in pure mathematics. However, I'm also trying to get my life off the ground!

The story is difficult and embarrassing, I guess. I have been a grad student for 9 years and recently finished my dissertation. My advisor is, however, indolent and neglectful. Sometimes worse than that. I have been without funding for the past three years, surviving off a small income in Redwood City. The entire time I have been writing and rewriting my dissertation. It's gone through 11 iterations at this point. Hitting over 200 pages at times.

The property I live in has been slated for demolition for a while, there's a county case number on file and everything. I technically have been living on borrowed time for years. I don't know how borrowed that time is or how much I have left. I haven't updated my wardrobe in over 5 years. My phone is so old my CVS app can't update anymore. My bottom teeth are so crooked they press against each other and hurt when I eat cold food. Medi-Cal doesn't cover braces.

There's a hole in my wall and some of my floorboards are warped and rotten.

Due to the difficult and toxic relationship I have had with my advisor, my CV is anemic and barren. I've mostly been focused on survival and mere completion. I'm working on projects now to build up a portfolio and hopefully pivot into mechanistic interpretability or ML research. Currently I'm working on topological flow matching applied to foundation models. Lack of compute makes more substantial contributions difficult though.

I'll find a way, I always do.

My family gets upset with me when I turn to others for help. I have been put through some very rough incidents in the past because of this. The situation here is not great. I'm safe, but it's not healthy. Sometimes they give me food. Most of the time it's expired or rotten. They keep trying to convince me to detransition. I've avoided asking for help up till now because of my own stubborn pride, but I can't keep living this way.

I'm quite tired, you know?