The Silence Is the Loudest Part — Starting My MSc AI at Surrey

In February 2025 I started my MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Surrey. I’ve been here a few weeks now, long enough for the jet lag to fade and the surrealness to remain.

Surreal is the only word

There’s a specific moment it hit me. I was walking across campus at night, past the lake, laptop bag on my shoulder, on my way back from a machine learning lecture — and I just stopped. A year ago I was writing about closing the gap between my theoretical degree and the real world. Now I’m in another country, in a degree that exists specifically to close it. It doesn’t feel earned yet. It feels like I’m visiting someone else’s life and nobody has checked my ID.

The February intake makes it stranger, and here’s the part nobody told me beforehand: we start with semester two. Not week one of a course built for us — semester two of the existing year, straight in. I found out essentially by being here. The September people have had months to form their groups, learn the systems, calibrate to the workload; we walk in mid-story and take the same modules cold — like joining a series at episode five, except there’s coursework on episodes one through four.

The culture shock nobody warns you about: silence

Everyone preps you for the big stuff — the food, the weather, the cost of a haircut. Nobody warns you about the quiet.

I grew up in India. Noise is the default state of the universe there — traffic, vendors, neighbours, weddings, three different songs from three different directions at all times. It’s the sound of people existing near each other, and you stop hearing it the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat.

My accommodation here is silent. Properly silent. Five people share my flat’s kitchen and we move around each other like polite ghosts. Doors close softly. At 9 PM the corridor sounds like 3 AM. The first week, the silence felt like something was wrong — like the building was holding its breath. I’d sit in my room and hear my laptop fan. I never knew my laptop had a fan.

I’m told you get used to it. I’m slowly learning to read it differently: it’s not coldness, it’s a different default for privacy. The same flatmate who won’t speak in the kitchen will happily talk for twenty minutes if you actually start a conversation. The silence is a wall only if you never knock.

The course itself

This is what I came for. The modules are exactly the gap I wanted to close — less “derive this on paper”, more “build it and defend your choices”. There are GPUs I can actually book. There are people around me who casually talk about papers I’d only ever read alone at 2 AM in Pune. My polyglot habit is paying off too — an international campus is the best language exchange server there is, except everyone is physically real and nobody is moderating.

It’s early. Ask me again when the deadlines start stacking. But for now: surreal, silent, and exactly where I should be.