I found out this morning that the paper (PDF) I co-authored with my advisor, which is essentially the 8-page version of my 100+ page thesis, was accepted to IROS 2004! So now my thesis work will be catapulted from Case's basement to an major international AI conference. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about that—even if I most likely won't be the one going to Japan.
Category: School
I picked up my degree today, so it's official! Now all I have to do is wave it around wildly, and hope I can flag down a job with it.
Category: School
So Case's alumni services are launching an exciting "new feature" which allows alumni to use their alumni.case.edu email address as a forwarding account forever, absolutely free. That sounds great in their marketing-speak announcements, which conveniently gloss over the fact that this is replacing the old system where we all kept fully-functioning email accounts forever, absolutely free.
I think I have 180 days to transition to a new email address (I haven't seen any announcement to current students, just a teensy blurb in the alumni newsletter I've been getting since I got my BS last year). Currently alumni, however, get a whopping month and a half before they are cut loose. And anyone who doesn't read the alumni news will be screwed, since there hasn't been any big "your email account will be going away in a month" warning. Perhaps their goal is to reduce the number of alumni donations they get?
I guess it's time to set up my EECS email account for general use, since my department shows a little more loyalty to its alumni than the university as a whole.
Category: School
I successfully defended my master's thesis today, and I have the handshakes to prove it!
Ok, I don't really have the handshakes, and they don't actually prove anything... but it's extremely cool none the less. Now some paperwork and a big stack of 25% cotton paper is the only thing between me and a fancy degree.
Category: School
Apparently, people can listen to, understand, and retain audio at double or triple speed—or higher! Doing some quick math: 4 years of classes with 30 weeks or so per year at 16+ hours per week gives me close to 2000 hours of classes. Let's be very generous, and say that 1/3 of those hours involved useful interaction that couldn't have been sped up. That still leaves me with 700-1000 hours at least that I spent listening to pointless empty space and long vowel sounds (some professors ...uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh... could ...uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh... be ...uuuuhhhhhh... shortened even ...uhhh... more. Much, much more). We won't even go into the hours that were 100% content free, and could thus be compressed infinitely without loss of information.
Now, even assuming it took me over five hours per page to write my thesis, I could have been done one or two times over with all that lost time. So now I won't have to feel bad about not having finished my thesis. I would have been done, but I had to listen to vowels instead.
Category: School
Today is a very good day: a joint paper that my Master's advisor submitted with myself and another grad student was accepted to this December's CDC '03. And since my advisor thinks it would be a good experience for me to present a paper at a conference, I get to go. And, since presenting research results is covered by our grant, all the big expenses will be paid.
So, to recap: In exchange for presenting a 6 page paper to a room full of people who are smarter than I am, I get a 5-day all expense paid vacation in the middle of the winter.
Oh, and did I mention that the conference is being held in Hawaii?
Category: School
In the middle of the afternoon, access services decided that I am no longer a person. Why? Because it's apparently too much trouble for the powers that be to check against graduate school records when they make the axe list to give to access services. So despite the fact that I'm still a student at the university, receiving a degree doomed me to wander, adrift, from locked room to locked room.
I guess this gives me incentive to finish my fall registration (since of course I need a schedule to get a valid card again), and begin the exciting process of re-requesting specific room and building accesses.
Here's to bureaucracy!
Category: School
Graduation came off with only minor hitches, and I'm now the proud owner of a Bachelor's of Science. It's funny, because for years that's all I wanted: get my diploma, get out, get a job. But in the last year or so my views have changed so much, so that now I'm in the midst of a Master's thesis, glad not to be leaving campus yet, and considering for the first time the idea of going right into a PhD program instead of the work force.
It took me all of high school, and most of college, but I've finally learned something truly useful and important. I've learned to stop thinking about education in terms of the light at the end of the tunnel. I finally shone my flashlight around a little, and found that the tunnel has quite a lot to offer. I'm not so sure anymore that I want to leave it at all.
Category: School
I am totally, 100% done with classes at CWRU (except thesis, but that's not really a class). So now I have a year to hang around campus while working, being one of those irritating people who has no homework, no finals, and no evil professors.
I plan to enjoy it immensely.
Category: School
That's right, you don't have to be a teacher at one of those high-brow institutions to cause stress and anguish! You too can anger your students with this simple, fool-proof recipe:
Now there's nothing left to do but sit back and enjoy the suffering. As an added bonus, tell your TA to grade all of them in 48 hours, and relish the horror of his realization that he could to give up sleep, research, and all of his classes, and he still probably wouldn't get it done, but that you'll blame him if the class wonders where their homeworks are while studying for the final (once they wake up from their stress-induced coma).
Category: School
It's pretty amazing how much there is to learn from other students; it's way beyond most of my formal education.
Today, I learned more about 3-D rendering of first-person games than I had ever even thought to wonder, all from a 45 minute conversation with another student. It seemed wildly more interesting and practical than so much of what I learn in classes, that it makes me wonder if the CS department should, instead of having so many classes, have a few classes and a ton of little student-run workshops. It would be like the ACM talks, but all the time. To graduate, you'd have to both attend a certain (large) number of workshops and demonstrate your understanding (with little projects or bigger projects tying multiple concepts together), and also teach some number of workshops. It would be a choose-your-own-adventure major.
Sure, it would stand a snowball's chance in hell of being accredited, but it would make the experience so much richer for those of us who actually want to learn. Granted, we can do that some now (like I did today), but we'd have so much more time for it in my system. I know it would not be for everyone, but with a large group of interested people, I think it would be fantastic.
Category: School
Big curves (on tests) are good
But on the other hand, they basically mean that at least one of the following is true:
None of which is a quality that I really look for in a teacher.
Still, given that one of the above is true, I'd much rather take the curve than not.
Category: School
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The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
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