Well technically, I could also phrase it “What am I doing on my Summer Vacation” and then reference writing this blog post, but the self-reference is too much for me. And self-reference is way beyond third graders; you need at least 5th graders to understand the concept.
From many perspectives, my time at Umass was probably definitely useless. My project, while sounding cool in an elevator pitch, turned out to be completely boring. Im not really sure where it went wrong or who is to blame, but all I know is that I asked several times to do something more interesting and I kept getting the response of “well we might be able to look at that after we are done”. The unfortunate part was that I really had no incentive to get the boring stuff done in an efficient manner because I never believed he would have me do something interesting after I was done. Most of it is probably my fault, but some of it certainly related to him. I also get the strong feeling that he was not expecting to be an advisor for this program, so he just wanted something that would keep me busy. It probably would have been all the same to him if I had showed up on day 1, took my paychecks, and went back to Long Island. Not too much I can do it about it now, but it really does make me pretty angry. I also fully resent being told that I was going to work with one professor upon acceptance to the program and then being given a professor who doesn’t match my listed interests at all. I get a lot angrier when I look at a few other projects which are really cool. Perhaps the grass is always greener on the other side though.
I was really hoping to get involved in a field and learn some new theories this summer. Machine learning sounded like a good one to get into; at least I know it has a ton of jargon and methods that I could learn. And even if my project had turned out to be a complete bust, I would have learned some stuff. Last summer, I didn’t learn a whole lot about a specific field, but I did learn a lot of computational complexity, approximations, and algorithms in general. Plus, Madden gave me a pretty darn good project and is a good advisor.
If what I took away from this summer was solely based upon my project and interactions with my advisor, the probability that I go to grad school would be significantly lower than what it was in May.
There is one thing to be said for this summer though and that is that it gave me a lot of time to read. And the things that I did read are keeping my grad school desires as high and perhaps even higher than when the summer began. Since I basically had nothing else to do while my 5 hour SQL queries were running, I read a lot of blogs and essays about theoretical computer science/algorithms/and computation in general. Particularly, I have found this blog to be amazing. Its all about theoretical computer science, with a focus on quantum computation. His writing is awesome and there’s a pretty good community of people who comment and fuel further discussions. I’ve also been reading a lot of other stuff, which unfortunately I dont have links for, about computation in other fields of science. Here is a presentation that was given at a “Computer Science: Past, Present, and Future” type of conference that talks about viewing the world through an algorithmic lens (thats pretty much the title of the talk).
I chose computer science in college because I started programming robots and it was awesome to see my model of the world (aka the code which reacts to sensor input) actually perform in some real environment. It was a great experience. I learned later that what I really like are the algorithms (though, robots are pretty damn cool too). Had it not been for my involvement with the ACM and the programming competitions, I can’t really say if I would have stuck with computer science, because the intro classes are so boring and don’t talk about all these grand sounding things like modeling the world or understanding the universe as a a basic set of operations. At Binghamton, it is truly amazing what a disservice we do to computer science. But I will have to leave that rant to another post.
Hopefully my next research experience thing will be more fruitful than Umass (it really cant be any worse). Ideally, it would be something interesting, my advisor will be famous, they will pay me gobs of money, and at the end of the summer I get a free ride into space and a trip around the world. But I will just settle for something interesting and a good community of people to work with.
Well, time for the poster fair aka convincing people that I wasn’t a waste of NSF money (read: lying to them).
