Life, the University, and Everything

"There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable."

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Microsoft just offered me a Software Design Engineer internship with the web search group. Awesome!

I didn't finish typing up my notes of the interview trip, but now that I know I did OK, I'm more eager to finish and share the details.

I'll talk soon with my recruiter about the details. For instance, how to accommodate me and Kat. (I had told him on Monday that my girlfriend Kat and I were really hoping to stay together this summer after being apart for 5-6 months in 2006, and he was on top of his game enough to mention Kat by name in his email today.)

I'll have about three weeks to make my decision. I got through the screening with Oracle and SAP Labs; they have specific internship offers forthcoming. I'm still phone-interviewing with Amazon data mining in two days. No word yet from Google or Yahoo!.

Labels: msft, summer

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I am ready to rock this career fair. The resume is shinier than ever after mock-interviewing and consulting with recruiters. High school has just about fallen off the horizon, which is kind of sad. (Wait, is "fallen off the horizon" even an expression? Survey says... about 11 results for Googling "fallen off the horizon". (Wow I really overuse, misuse, and abuse parentheses on this blog.) Anyway...)

I've heard that confidence is essential; mine should be boosted by the fact that Microsoft's flying me up to Seattle to interview in Redmond next Monday, and the fact that Oracle already made me an internship offer that I didn't even deign to notice sitting in my inbox over winter break! Heh. Cockiness.

PS: Firefox's spellchecker dictionary doesn't have the word "inbox"?!

PPS: Or "spellchecker"?!?

Labels: msft

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An unexpected coup on the Spanish front. This just in: I actually placed into third-quarter first year Spanish, not the first quarter of the accelerated two-quarter first year track. So I only actually have to take one quarter of Spanish to satisfy the language requirement. I could switch classes now, but I'm almost definitely better off waiting for Spring quarter, when there are many sections of third-quarter Spanish to choose from, while Winter only has a few offerings.

Lo siento, mi profesora. ¡No hasta mañana!

PS: I finally switched to the new Google-connected blogger dashboard. Time-wasting experimentation ensues.

Labels: classes

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After a week, my shopping list has gone from a whopping nine classes to a respectable five:

CS 140 Operating Systems
Mendel Rosenblum
3-4 units
MWF 10-10:50 (SCPD)

CS 223A Intro Robotics
Oussama Khatib
3 units
MW 2:15-3:30 (SCPD)

CS 223B Intro Computer Vision
Sebastian Thrun
3 units
MW 11-12:15 (SCPD)

SPANLANG 1A Accelerated First-Year Spanish
5 units
MTWThF 11-11:50

MS&E 246 Game Theory with Engineering Applications
Ramesh Johari
3 units
TTh 2:15-3:45

SCPD means the lectures are available on scpd.stanford.edu. (In case you're curious, the fallen four were CS 224M Multi-Agent Systems; CS 262 Computational Genomics; STATS 315B Modern Applied Statistics: Data Mining; and EE 364B Convex Optimization II.)

CS 140 is well-renowned Death By Programming^TM, but I can't be a fully qualified computer scientist without knowing operating systems. CS 223A and 223B are both interesting and relevant; their difficulty is hard to evaluate. (I wish Thrun were offering 226 Statistical Robotics instead of 223B this year, but hey, that's the advantage of having a fifth year after this one. And I'm going to take whatever he's offering; he's director of the Stanford AI Lab and leader of Stanford's 1st-place DARPA Grand Challenge team.) Three CS classes is considered the threshold of sanity^*; with some reservations, I say, bring it on!

In non-CS news, Spanish is a requirement that is probably no longer profitable to postpone; it's superfluous to me but hopefully will be minorly gratifying without costing too much time or sleep. MS&E 246 seems like an interesting class (and not too much work) about multi-agent engineering problems, which is somewhat relevant to AI. I might even audit it if I decide to drop it.

^*Of course it depends on which CS courses. You have to go by reputation, not unit count -- it's a well-known fact that units do not correlate with difficulty at the advanced/graduate level. It's almost laughable that Introductory Spanish is about as many units as CS 223A and CS 223B combined.

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In an observation that ought to qualify as "profound" in the context of the sleepy brunch table:

Dan: "I'm trying to start a non-profit... Hopefully I can get it set up in time for the summer."
Me: "Hmm. It's probably a lot easier to start a non-profit organization than a for-profit one."

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hippopotamus
antihippopotamus
annihilation

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For weeks now, I've caught a catchy song snippet on the radio and in TV ads. The snippet goes, "wha-oh, uh-oh, ah-oh" over and over (with the occasional "hey!"). This is not easy to Google. I mentioned to Kat that I just heard it in an ad for reality TV show "Beauty and the Geek" (I assume the show is terrible). A minute later she had found it: "High School Never Ends" by Bowling for Soup. Web-savvy girlfriend for the win! I was delighted to find that I like the real-word lyrics of the song as much as the "ah oh" parts. Bowling for Soup sounds like the latest of the Good Charlotte and Wheatus type of unpopular-kid-in-school pop, except good lord is their guitarist huge.

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I'm learning more about myself every day.

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