Shabbat/Sunday – Day 243/244
April 4, 2013
I am pleased to mention the inclusion of yet another wonderful person in my life. The delightful Tova Reiter of U Chicago fame. Chol Hamoed (intermediate festival days) brought her to Penn, to spend time with her close friend Ariella. Surprisingly enough, despite our numerate difference we hit it off almost straight away. My only regret is that I will unlikely be seeing a lot of her in the near future due to geographical concerns. My life in a nutshell.
Shabbat was Glee Elections, and boy did they take forever. Most of the day was spent cooped up in a little room discussing the various merits of all the candidates. And we didn’t even finish. That said, I did take significant breaks to try and hunt down food that was Kasher l’Pesach, and ended up eating bananas, macaroons and matza sandwiches. Not the best of lunches.
Sunday was dedicated to a lot of hard work, just getting coding done before chag came in again. There didn’t seem to be enough time though to really do anything between meals and Hillel and getting ready. Additionally, I had office hours in the evening so I had to prepare offline any cards and info etc I needed.
Another highlight of the weekend was the PGC trip to sing at the Philadelphia Philly’s Baseball Game! I saw a few real baseball players and was screened on the jumbotron! So exciting!
Finally, late Sunday night, after shule and dinner, I read my new Douglas Hofstader book while my students coded and occasionally asked me questions. Ended up staying till around 1AM as some people decided to hand in their work past the midnight deadline.
Wednesday/Thursday – Day 233/234
March 25, 2013
Wednesday was the usual mix again, nothing exciting. An hour or so on the piano here, a lecture there.
Rehearsal as per usual in the evening, nothing particularly notable here.
Thursday saw the cancellation of physics, due to an overseas professor and a failure of the video projection system. Lunch was a good chat with Robbie Glynn, during which a poorer individual from West Philly stopped by our conversation on tech and garnered assistance from us in figuring out how to use his new calculator.. That was most certainly a unique experience. Spent another hour and a half in Sweeten Alumni House playing on their beautiful Boston Grand Piano. Unfortunately I didn’t bring enough music with me and was relegated to those I knew best (plus a little jazz improvisation).
Lunch at Hillel, a few more long conversations, then back to my room to watch the video lecture for Physics. Then I tried looking at the homework attached to the class and almost gave up on the spot. Intensely difficult problems with little connection to the lecture material. This was going to take some serious hard work.
In the evening I was planning on going to see Patience as presented by The Penn Singers, however unfortunately, my TAing got in the way. I was holding extra office hours for the first milestone submission of their project and got quite caught up helping the numbers of students who were still working on it late the night it was due. Ended up hanging around till midnight and then walking back with a few students.
Thursday/Friday – Day 227/228
March 20, 2013
Thursday was packed full again! More interviews, more office hours, more project work and more of pretty much everything but Glee Club. I guess we needed at least a little break after the previous night. My tech interview today was with a firm called Palantir and ultimately unsuccessful. I was a little frustrated as I felt they had misplaced me during team evaluation, where they decided I’d be best of interviewing for the front end and design team, really not my speciality. Regardless the interview went ok, the interviewers were friendly but perhaps ultimately not the best fit for me. Thankfully, I still have a few more lines in the ocean. Finally, a huge surprise for Thursday came in the form of a meeting with a Professor I’d been trying to chasing up for around a month.
Prof. Matt Blaze, a somewhat colourful character, with an interest in computer security, had a well deserved reputation for being hard to track down. However, it was certainly worth the effort to do so. After a thorough grilling on my background, my knowledge and ideas and more importantly, my passion and my ability to innovate a spark seemed to leap into his eye.
“So tell me,” he relaxed back into his chair, “what do we have to do to get you to study your PhD here?”
I was somewhat shocked, as my intention in meeting him was to more scope out the field of Professors and Penn and find people working in my area of interest. And here was a potential supervisor!
“I want you to move in to my lab,” he continued and proceeded to give me the PIN code to the door, “and, when someone asks you what you are working on, you are to feel guilty until you have a good answer”.
Friday with no classes, I allowed myself a little sleep in. Then it was to my new office to settle in. I felt a little awkward and out of place, but hopefully over time, I’ll find my niche there. I’m still very uncertain about the whole PhD thing, and Philly is a long way away from home to go for five to six years!
The afternoon was a series of meetings again, first the TA meeting in which Val (our Professor) took some length to describe my potential as a PhD student, much to my embarrassment! Then a meeting with another security Professor, Steve Zdancewic, who specialized in language and verification security. Interesting stuff. Finally, to finish the daytime, was TA training, useless but fun as always.
After TA training, the facilitator, PhD student Peter Michael Osera, stopped me to talk about PhD and the troubles and dangers I might face. He made sure to introduce me to a friend of his who had been supervised by the same professors that seemed likely to one day be my supervisors. I took the warnings into account and also their advice to apply to a few more places as well. Perhaps The University of Melbourne should be on the books.
The evening wasn’t quite as pleasant, had somewhat of a strong disagreement with a friend I see a lot of, and that was most distressing, only to be calmed down by equally strong friends at Penn Hillel for Shabbat. B’H for that. Later in the evening the fight continued and I raced off to Steph Li’s waiting arms in tears, where time passed so quickly and my smiles returned. I had to be kicked out as the hour grew far later than I had paid attention to! What a blessing it is to have such good friends.