In Which I Am A +1
September 23, 2014
This post will be a little rushed as my draft was deleted and I’m already well behind.
The rest of the week was busy in much the same way with a few additions. The evening brought an interview for ISAB, the international student advisory board, a group dedicated to connecting with the administration over issues of international student welfare. My interview went fairly well, though I felt I ranted a little about the state of undergraduate education. My time at Hineni had made me quite a fiery critic of many educational practices within universities.
Following the interview, I had a little time to get back to homework before heading off at 9PM for a Google recruiting event. I was attending as a +1 of Nikki Limtiaco, Rigel’s girlfriend and a former student of mine with whom I was good friends. The event was held at Pod, the fanciest sushi bar around and Google provided generously with much food and an open bar. I eventually gave in and tried one of the nicer whiskeys while chatting to a Google engineer, Michael who had previously worked in my current lab. The event was highly enjoyable with many of the top students from Penn CIS attending. I made a bunch of new friends and additionally swapped details with Michael who had a lot to say about where I would be working for the next few years.
I returned late and got a little more work done before the usual start the next day. Class on Thursday were the same as always but I was incredibly stressed out by my homework load. I did attend the Glee/Penn Dance mixer in the evening, but stayed for a little over half an hour before returning to my room to continue working. Friday was much the same however the evening held a few fun differences. Friday at 3:30PM was my Penn Pipers audition, an acapella subset of the Glee Club, known for their quality of tone and ability to blend. I was excited to audition as not doing so was one of my few regrets from my previous time at Penn. The audition went very well, with me singing a rendition of “Fly Me To the Moon” as popularized by Sinatra.
From there I attended the PennApps opening ceremonies. For those who missed my previous accounts of PennApps, it’s a ‘hackathon’ (read: programming competition) with over six hundred attendees from around the world coming to Penn to compete for tens of thousands of dollars in prizes. Though I wouldn’t be hacking away all of Saturday, it was still an opportunity to see friends, generate new ideas and meet new people.
After the opening ceremony I raced to Hillel, where I met with a few graduate students to head to Rodin for a meal hosted by Sarah. The meal was small and lovely and went late. However my night still wasn’t over as I headed back to PennApps to play board games with the representatives who were there from Facebook.
The next day I woke up just in time for lunch, arriving at Hillel where I was to meet Elan and Naomi Hachen who were hosting me for that meal along with yet more graduate students, including Debby whom I had become friends with the previous week and who had also attended Sarah’s meal. The meal was really lovely, and again went late into the afternoon. At around 8PM I headed back to PennApps, this time with my laptop and was reading to do some coding my self.
I was up way into the late hours of the night coding, reading up on documentation and finally at 4AM, finished my project and walked home to get into bed for a few hours before judging and presentations.
In Which My Calendar Is Abused
September 16, 2014
Today’s schedule was fairly intense, with my first scheduled break appearing at 11PM.
The morning was a fierce bout of work, aiming to complete some of my homework for physics and machine learning (which was taking far more than the expected number of hours). I was realizing that my skills in probability and statistics left much to be desired for graduate coursework. The lineup following that was my usual physics class, which I had now resolved to understand but not to complete all the homework for.
After a quick lunch, it was time for a fuller piano lesson. For forty-five minutes I had a great time learning new chord progressions and a new song, felt like with a bit of practice and some guidance I’d be able to make progress much more quickly than I had previously been doing. Unfortunately I had to truncate the lesson for a meeting with the dietitian, which, while helpful, provided me with advice that I found very hard to follow. My schedule was really too hectic and I needed to do something about that before anything else.
From the appointment I set about arranging an event for the CIS PhDs in mid October. I had to fill out a whole bunch of forms for room bookings and to get permission to serve alcohol at the event as Philadelphia and the University regulations were quite tight.
After finishing a few more hours in the lab, I went to the Graduate Student Center for an event with Graduate Hillel, and met a few nice new students, who though small in number were high in quality. There was a fairly even gender balance however it was highly slanted towards Masters and Professional degrees with me being the only PhD student in the room.
Dinner was a little more relaxed this evening, but following it was a full three hour PGC rehearsal that lasted until 11! I worked until a little after midnight before sinking in to bed from a busy day.
In Which I Meet and Miss Class
September 10, 2014
Today was my first 7AM wakeup for my 9AM class. After a good while of waking up later, it was unsurprising that I was drowsy and distracted for the duration of the class.
This possibly led to my further distraction during the day. My productivity was saved by a meeting with Nadia to discuss progress on the paper I was reading and additionally to make plans to help some of her other students. At some point she asked me if I had time to continue the meeting at which point, forgetting that I actually had class, replied that I had until the end of the day. The meeting was interesting and enjoyable, but when I later realized that I had missed algorithms, I felt more than a little guilty.
After the meeting I worked for a while in my office before TGIF in which the PhD students met up for some elements of food and drink. I had a good time chatting to Nadia and a few other students about fun things to do while at Penn and life in Philly in general, but soon enough I ran out of time and headed back to my room to get ready for the proceedings at Hillel that evening.
After shul at Shira, Rina Krevat (visiting from NYC), Elan Kiderman, Debby Greenstein and I went upstairs to the Hillel graduate students reception. I felt a little awkward striking up conversations left and right and repeating the same smalltalk over and over, falling back on my nationality as a talking point. Soon enough the four of us decided to go downstairs for dinner. However Hillel was pretty packed so we ended up taking our food over to the lounge. It ended up being a great chance for me to talk more to Elan and Debbie, who I knew but not nearly as well as I could have. I ended up chatting till well past midnight and only when I realized how late it was did I call it a night and head to bed happy.