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).

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

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.

Holy crap.

“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.

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

Now all I have to do is graduate.

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).

I’ve basically got three choices. Here they are, in ascending order:
UCLA: 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: 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.

University 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.