So there’s been a lot of random things on my mind lately.
Right now, I’m pissed off at US Airways. I did their online check-in (which, BTW, is way too complicated for being check-in) and went to print my boarding passes. Hm… something screwed up with their page and I can only print my boarding pass from Denver to Pittsburgh. Oh well, not big deal, let’s try that again.
…
Oh, so I can’t check-in again because “a member of your party has already checked-in; please check-in and recieve boarding passes at the airport.” Um, what? Okay, getting past the stupidity of that, then there must be a “reprint boarding pass option.”
…
Nope. Well, damn.
Why can’t all airlines be like Southwest?
Also been thinking a lot about college and how it changes people. I dunno… I remember when I was sitting here a little less than 2 years ago, excited as hell (but nervous as hell) to be heading off to college. I remember arriving there and feeling invinsible… like I could do anything. It was a brand new start for me (just like when I moved here from CO), and I felt confident… like I could leave behind who I was in high school and become who or what I always wanted to be.
And, of course, you can’t really do that. You can only change who you are gradually. It’s unreasonable to expect yourself to be able to suddenly become the opposite of what you were.
At the same time, it’s also unreasonable to expect nothing to change. It’s a different environment. You’re with different people. If you were well-known by everyone… well… you’re not anymore. If you were the loner who sat in the corner by himself, you won’t have much of an opportunity to do that at Orientation.
So I guess a big part of heading to college for me was finding the right balance of the two, and I have to say I think things worked out pretty well. I’m not nearly as bold or outgoing as I envisioned myself being. At the same time, I’m not the same shy-but-popular-in-a-geeky-way kid I was in high school. And I think I’m really happy with that. I mean, yes, there are still things about me I’d change, but I can work on those. I don’t expect things to suddenly change overnight the way I did before.
Meh.
Anyone else have similar experiences?
It’s also amazed me how much I’ve learned in the past 2 years. I mean, I got back and was able to talk to my dad about a lot of the work he’s doing (he’s an engineer at Intel; not sure what area). I actually know more than him now in some areas (CS areas though, obviously). Some of the stuff I’m learning was stuff he did in graduate work.
I wrote up a page of major programming projects (on my CMU page) yesterday, and a lot of the stuff is actually quite impressive. I mean, how many freshmen get to write a photomosaic program, solve the Kevin Bacon problem (ick), write various compression algorithms, and write a (primitive but functional) AI? What about design a processor from scratch using nothing but NAND gates? And who could forget the auto-cannibal maker?
Even stuff that I’ve done this year… malloc, the caching web proxy, buffer bomb, and the Sudoku-solver… when you think about it, those are non-trivial problems. The fact that they’re giving them to us as sophomores says something as to the quality of education here. I mean, hell, the fact that OS is a sophomore/junior level course says something.
A lot of people told me, as I was deciding on my undergrad university, that it’s grad school that really matters. Undergrad is insignificant and where you go isn’t important. You know what? I disagree completely. I think that, at least for me, undergrad is the most important. I mean, really, all grad schools are the same. You’re going to be researching stuff you’re interested in. Sure, having more resources at your disposal might be helpful, but really, is that going to make or break your thesis?
Undergrad, on the other hand, is where you learn all the skills necessary for your (eventual) career. For me especially, since I plan to go into the workforce immediately after I get my BS, it’s even more important. Plus coming from a good undergrad school undoubtedly has some effect on what grad schools you’re accepted to (if you’re into that kind of thing).
So yeah. All of you who said I should go to UofA because undergrad doesn’t matter–you were wrong :-P
Curious what other people think as to this as well.
Oh yes, I promised pictar.
Using up printing quota FTW!
Ahh! Soo many things I can respond to in this entry :-)
You’re exactly right about changing yourself for college. My personality definitely underwent a change when I went off to Case, but a lot of my essential traits were too well established to go away. It’s easiest to keep your old self as a base and add new bits as they develop naturally based on environment. A big part for me, freshman year, was the discovery that I could make friends on my own — and then my new group started rubbing off on me. I noticed after a year or two that I wasn’t really the same person I was in high school, and I wonder how much that was noticed by my parents and friends from back home.
Re continuing on, I would say that your undergrad choices and experiences will actually define what you do for grad school, rather than become irrelevant. I didn’t even consider grad school as an option until my senior year of undergrad, when I decided I didn’t want a plain old CS job, and I’ve ended up studying something that I didn’t know even existed as a field until quite recently. It may be that the “M.S. LTI CMU” on my résumé will be more important to people than the “B.S. CS CWRU,” but I see myself as a product of the undergrad program at Case who now has a CMU bent to his geekery.
I will happily ramble on on this topic for pages and pages, but I don’t want to hit the max character limit on your comment box. Feel free to ask me sometime if you’re really interested, though.
US Airways is shit-tacular. If it can be screwed up, they’ll screw it up. Plus, their online check-in required Internet Explorer last time I used it.
Even worse, it’s the only airline that flies direct from Providence to Pittsburgh, so I’m stuck with it. The only things I hate as much as the airlines are yuppies and kids who think they can run a web hosting/design “company” by putting up a flashy web page with pictures stolen from other web company’s web pages. Fucking yuppie kids. Life should be about the pursuit of happiness, intelligence, and enlightenment, not money and material goods.
(Way for me to get off on a tangent there. Back to work now.)
Wow.
Really interesting thoughts, alan (link to comment spam here). Now I’m feeling shaky about heading off to CSU… But not too bad. Just interesting things to think about. And it really is impressive how much you’re doing, even in the early undergrad projects… dang.
Cool stuff.
“If you were the loner who sat in the corner by himself, you won’t have much of an opportunity to do that at Orientation.”
This is patently false; I know from personal experience.
Nonetheless, basically yes. It might also change things if I put actual effort into change, rather than having it be purely accidental. But yeah; things happen gradually and you realize at the end of a semester (or over break, or whatever) that suddenly you’re not the same anymore. It’s interesting.
“Remember… you’re asking for it.” Here you go: some more stuff about grad school, as requested.
I mentioned last time that your undergrad choice defines your future work — what I mean is that my guess is that a large part of what you get interested in for a master’s or Ph.D. depends on what you studied as an undergrad. Here there are lots of people who get all crazy about type theory and category theory and complexity theory, but these subjects didn’t exist at Case and so, coming from there, I never would have possibly picked to become a type theorist.
But now that I’m here, I do feel like I’m absorbing CMU culture — probably mostly because I like pretending to be an undergrad still and hanging out with all of you! I don’t think that the focus of grad school is the same as undergrad — not so much on social or dorm life aspects and more on a commitment to the work. I get the feeling that your graduate work may be worth more in the long run because you can’t fake things in grad school the way you could as an undergrad, when you were the Guy Who Usually Sits in the Middle of the Sixth Row in a large class. My advisor has been at least the co-professor of three of my classes so far, and I’m constantly bumping into other professors in the hallways, etc.
It’s true that the quality of your undergraduate institution is important for grad school applications and whatnot, but I found that experience counts for quite a lot too. I applied to and got into two journalism programs (Northwestern and Boston University) without being a journalism major and without ever having taken more than a semester of formal journalism class… and even that was in high school. But I’d worked on the school paper at Case for four years and done all sorts of jobs with that, and that was apparently enough. So you probably wouldn’t have seriously damaged your grad school chances by going to U of A, provided that you would still have been able to show your interest, efforts, and background in whatever field you were applying for.
Eeps — I”m rambling. Going to stop now before I quit making sense. Enjoy!