School

Advice (Unsolicited) / School — Comments Off
7
Dec 09

Graduate Application Season

It’s that time of the year again, the most wonderful time of the year: time for college seniors to start applying to graduate school.

Although I’m quite happy where I am now, I look back on grad application time as one of the most physically and emotionally exhausting times of my life. My advisor Amin Vahdat has just written a very thoughtful article on the graduate school application process, how to know if you really want to go to graduate school and how to get into a good program. I also wrote a related post last year on the more technical side of the application process.

To all the applicants this year, good luck! You should consider applying to UCSD (nudge nudge, wink wink).

Random / School — Comments Off
4
Jan 08

Winter break productivity

This basically sums up what my productivity would have been like if I had stayed at lab between Christmas and New Year’s:

phd010408s.gif

Computers / School — Comments Off
7
Aug 07

In the land of shrinking resources

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m firing with both barrels lately with the nerdular nerdocity. Hope this doesn’t scare anybody off.

The state of the only computer cluster our undergraduate parallelism initiative group can still use can be summed up by this pie chart:

The cluster is hosed

Translation: the cluster is hosed. To quote Strong Bad, the system is down. Well, 82.81% of it is, anyway.

That’s right: of the 64 computers in our once magnificent cluster, a mere 11 remain. Those that are up are being pushed to the limits of their endurance (it is hard to get one of these machines to 100% load, but as you can see a lot of the remaining ones are at exactly that). Well, you pays your money and you takes your compute cluster, I suppose. It certainly does make for some impressive load average charts.

The end of summer has also heralded the unexpected return our in-room Internet connection to its former glacial speed. Can’t say they didn’t warn us, but it’s still not the happiest of occurrences. Thankfully I only have to deal with it until next Friday.

School — Comments Off
22
May 07

Graduation pictures are up

I’ve posted some graduation photos on Flickr, mirrored in the Photos section. Enjoy!

School — 2 Comments
11
May 07

Moment of Clarity

I think it just hit me that I’m graduating in a week.

Holy crap.

Fun and Games / School — Comments Off
10
May 07

Ghostride the Natcar

My friends just finished up their mechatronics course, and they made a robotic car. What do you do to celebrate finishing your robotic car? Ghostride it, of course.

School — 1 Comment
1
May 07

Overheard in Berkeley

“So I think I’m going to change my major again … are there any well-paying jobs in education?”

“All I’m asking is that I know what drug my roommate is on at any given time …”

Ahh, freshmen.

School — 2 Comments
15
Apr 07

UCSD here I come

I’m going to UCSD for graduate school.

It’s a big decision, and I feel like I’ve made the right one.

Now all I have to do is graduate.

School / Website Updates — Comments Off
12
Mar 07

UCLA photos online

I’ve posted the photos I took while at UCLA. Flickr is a little slow lately; I might host these locally at some point, but right now there isn’t time to set anything up. Anyway, you can find them under the Photos section.

Update: So, turns out my camera’s date was wrong … really wrong. I’ve updated the images on Flickr, so they’re accurate to the day (although as far as it’s concerned they were all taken at midnight … shh).

School — 4 Comments
4
Mar 07

Graduate school update: I’m going

I’ve heard back from every university but MIT and Caltech. Since I really don’t have a whole lot of interest in going to either, it looks like the graduate admissions process is at an end. I’m nothing but pleased, both because it’s over and because the choices I’ve got are so good.

I’ve basically got three choices. Here they are, in ascending order:
UCLA LogoUCLA: It’s a great location, close to my parents and many of my closest friends. It’s also a very respected program and has a number of Cal alumni on the faculty. It’s not my top priority overall, but it’s definitely got some strong things going for it.

UCSD logo

UCSD: One of the best computer science programs in the country, not to mention the beautiful weather. Their financial aid offer is pretty attractive as well, although I’m not sure they’re as well-funded as the next school on the list.

UW logoUniversity of Washington: Next to MIT, Cal and Stanford (the bastards … I’m not bitter or anything), this is the top CS program in the country. They just got a new CS building which is supposedly fantastic. They have generous funding from M$, which will help my research I’m sure. Let’s not forget that everybody I’ve talked to at Cal has said that UW is “the obvious choice”. Seattle isn’t the best in the weather department, but they say that it’s not much worse than SF has been in the last couple years, so I’ll probably be able to handle it.

So, there you have it. I’m not staying in the bay area (although I will probably come back here to work, what with the Silicon Valley being here and everything). I might not even be staying in California. At this point, however, I’m not ruling anything out.

When I was applying to colleges not so many years ago, visit days made my decision easier. That’s why I’m going to them … all of them. This means I’m not going to be in Berkeley for about 60% of March. In fact, between the 8th and the 18th of March, I’ll be at Cal for a grand total of one day. Thankfully, this being my last semester, I’m hardly taking anything. As I go to visit days, I’ll be streaming photos to Flickr, which means they’ll show up in the Photos section. Stay tuned.

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