The Globetrotting Geek

Friday – Day 242

March 31, 2013

Passover has made my posting a little sporadic in the past few days, but I’ll do my best to keep it up. Friday I got up late, worked in my room for a while and then headed to Hillel for a good few hours to eat as large a lunch as I could manage. It didn’t keep me very full, as I kept eyeing food all afternoon.

After that I went to my office, coded for a bit, sat thinking for a little. Research is difficult. At 3PM I headed to my TA meeting, where Val Tannen decided to announce my news to all the TAs, embarrassing me greatly, though I had to give him a little leeway given his status as my referee. TA training was mostly unexciting, however I did compose a neat little one liner (plus variable instantiation outside the function) for recursive calculation of fibbonacci numbers with memorization. Hooray for ternary statements!

Made it to shul on time tonight and had a pleasant dinner with the usual crew. After dinner the Shabbatones and the Penn Bloomers were performing. The Bloomers were surprisingly excellent, and their skits as an all female musical comedy troupe were actually funny enough to laugh out loud!

After the performances, I chilled with Ariella, Hannah Dardashti Madeline Brown and Alexis Block for a number of hours, telling stories from my travels! Made it to bed well past midnight.

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.

Wednesday/Thursday/Friday – Days 204/205/206

February 26, 2013

Wednesday was another chance to catch up on a little sleep. I arose from slumber at a good ten-thirty, got reading for the morning and promptly fell asleep on my desk chair. Not much of a success. A nap during Networking helped a little and before I knew it I was back in rehearsal.

I am so glad to be back in regular rehearsal, with our regular repertoire  As much as the spring show was quite the spectacular to behold, the music wasn’t quite to my taste. Unfortunately though, it seems much of my old favorites have quite left my head! Ah well, time to crunch down and relearn the good tunes.

From there it was another all nighter to write some more code! Hooray.

Thursday. Physics. Team meeting. Tired. Running out of steam. Need Shabbat. Played Piano. Fell Asleep.

Friday was a grading party. Due to the completion of the CIS-121 midterm by our students, we now had 106 papers to mark (Australian for ‘grade’). This meant from 10:30AM to 3PM I was sitting in a room with the other TAs pouring over paper after paper, marking question after question and dearly hoping that my recitation did well (they did!). One brief intermission was a quick visit to the careers fair to talk to a certain employer with whom I am interviewing in the near future. I’m quite excited as I’ve had a little more practice at phone coding interviews and am now a little more confident. Hopefully it all goes well.

After grading was our regular staff meeting (not so much fun) and our TA training session (not so exciting). Though, through the TA training I have made a few friends from the CIS TA body, in particular Amalia Hawkins and Harmony Li, both lovely lower level CIS TAs (the classes, not their skills).

Friday night I was back at Shira Chadasha which wasn’t as musical as usual but still not bad and then to dinner through Hillel ‘mix-em-ups’. My table was a little uninspired but it was still nice and afterwards I spent the requisite hours with Aviva, Ariella, Michal and co.

Finally my week was over and I could head to bed for sweet repose.