A much needed update!

Posted by Steve Hanna on March 14th, 2007 filed in Random Tags: , , , ,

My life has been crazy this semester. I am taking ECE440, Physics 511, CS591 and ECE598 (solid state electronics, advanced nonlinear dynamics, security reading group and secure hardware/trusted computing respectively). Overall, I am enjoying all of my classes, however, ECE440 is a major thorn in my side. I won’t elaborate on the details, but the structure of the course is atrocious and the grading scheme is equally as bad. I have a great professor for the class, I just think the structure could be improved upon quite a bit.

As far as graduate school goes, I have been accepted into UIUC and UC-Berkeley; while I was rejected from MIT and UWash. I received an RA from UIUC and a fellowship for my first year at Berkeley(still waiting on NSF!). I just spent my weekend interviewing for a San Francisco based company named Riverbed (for a reverse engineering position) and then I spent the remainder of my time visiting Berkeley. After speaking to a bunch of great graduate students and professors, I have decided to attend Berkeley. I am really excited but right now the feeling is very bittersweet. On one hand I am so stoked that I got into Berkeley that I often find myself in fits of euphoria. On the other hand, I am really sad because I feel like I am leaving so much behind. I’ll do my best not to get too emotional in my post, so I’ll move on to another subject.

As I mentioned I interviewed with Riverbed and they made me an offer. The initial offer was pretty low and I wasn’t impressed but I made a counter offer and they made a more reasonable second offer. However, I also applied at ICIR to be an intern with Vern Paxon doing network security stuff and I should hear if I get an offer sometime this week. Both offers are within about 20 miles of each other, so I suppose I will be working in northern California this summer.

My greatest feat that I have accomplished this semester is quitting WoW. My life is changing so much right now, I think it would be a total waste for me to sit in a virtual world for hours at a time. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game and I had a great time being with friends. But, with 68 days (24 hour days!) played, I feel like I could have done something more productive with my time. Some gracious soul on eBay now owns my account.

As for spring break, I think I will head home. I have a project idea that could land a publication in a small conference; so I think I’ll be working on an implementation over break.

Anyone reading this, friends right now in this time of change are really important to me. So if I haven’t heard from you in a while or you just feel like chatting, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Chances are that I would very much like to hear from you.

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