I probably should have updated this sometime in the past year. In that time I wrote an undergraduate thesis and graduated with high distinction from Harvey Mudd College, with a B.S. in Mathematics. Hooray! Starting this fall, I’ll be working towards my Ph.D. in math at the University of Oregon.
Well, it’s been a while.
I did research at HMC over the summer, in some pretty awesome new approaches to parallelism, but I won’t talk much about that here. More importantly, I’m in my 7th semester at Mudd now, taking a bunch of crazy math courses, working on writing a thesis, and being amazed that I’ve a) been here this long and b) only been here this long. I’m going to miss this place when I leave.
After a week of heated machining, negotiating, and panic, my third and final room draw is over. Moreover, everything worked out perfectly; we now have 5 suites in Sontag.
I retire.
Well, I know what I’ll be doing this summer. I applied to four research programs; three math REUs and the research program through the HMC computer science department. While I was turned down from the Claremont Colleges math REU, I received an email today offering me a position here at HMC in CS, which I accepted. I still haven’t heard back from the other two REUs I applied to, but I already have an answer for them.
Spring break is always a nice time to relax, but sooner or later it has to end. Of course, this means we have to go back to work.
It also means that room draw begins.
On the surface, room draw is just picking the room you’ll live in for the next year, but it’s actually an enormous exercise in management, organization, and negotiation. I suppose that’s why I enjoy it so much; it’s a chance to Make Things Work on a huge scale. Or maybe I just have delusions of grandeur.
And with that, my work takes a week off. Spring break! The most fun a college student over the legal drinking age can have.
Which means, of course, I’m posting this from my college computer lab, at a 24-hour LAN party.
Ironically, I haven’t actually played any games here yet–I’ve been busy finishing my work. That’s done now, though, so I’m on my own to relax for the next week. At some point in the next few days, I should be getting a CD turntable and a 2-channel mixer in the mail; then I can start DJing. But for now, I’m recuperating from half a semester of work.
And dinner’s here!
I thought I would be panicking right now, scrambling to finish my compilers assignment by midnight while hoping I’d still have enough time to take an exam and prep for a presentation. Instead, I’m playing Touhou Mahjong and writing a blog post. As it turns out, my homework isn’t due for a couple weeks still, so I have far more time this week than I thought.
Of course, at the rate Touhou Mahjong is eating my free time…
I’ve finished up the framework for my other two blogs (linked on the right). On one hand, this is cool; now all I need to do is start adding content to them. On the other hand, it’s bad, since I’ve been doing this instead of my actual work, which includes an exam, a rewrite, a presentation, a programming assignment, and a personal statement (all due between now and the end of the week).
I may be in trouble.
Well, I suppose this place is pretty much put together. That’s far more than can be said about the other two blogs I’m starting (they’re linked on the right, and both still unfinished). This blog will probably require both more and less work than the others; while I don’t need to specifically prepare for any post in this blog, I’m usually very bad at talking about myself, especially to people I’m not familiar with.
So what’s this blog for, anyway? Like the tagline says, I’m planning on writing about my life; this could be anything from what I did yesterday, to my thoughts on the current state of the world, to existentialism. I don’t expect it to be very interesting to most people, and I don’t really intend it to be (at least in any coherent fashion); I expect it to be a stage for my thoughts. It might fail; it might be awesome. We’ll see how it goes.