June 17 - June 23: Hiking in Havasupai Canyon, a tributaty of the Grand Canyon. I will hike with my mom and brother, two 3rd cousins, and their parents.
June 30 - September 9 (approximate): Mozilla Foundation internship in Mountain View, California.
Before and after the Grand Canyon trip, I'll probably spend time at my parents' house near Los Angeles, California.
What I will do after this summer is up in the air. I might return to UCSD to continue the computer science PhD program, which I'm not enjoying much so far, or I might try to get a job at the Mozilla Foundation, Google, Yahoo!, etc.
I'm in Austin now. I'm doing well except for two things: it gets very hot outside, and I might not have (fast) Internet access in my apartment for two more weeks. I'm still trying to find a roommate.
My extended family gave me some awesome graduation presents: a San Diego hiking guide, a small MP3 player to help me keep my sanity while traveling, and over $1700 in checks and gift certificates.
Find a hotel near my Austin apartment (Google rocks!).
Find a way to back up my 40GB hard drive or at least the important stuff (5GB of hard-to-find music + 1GB of other stuff) before I ship my computer to Austin. I have an old computer with 6GB free but I'm not sure how I can transfer the data.
Figure out how to ship my computer to Austin.
Find out if it makes sense to rent a monitor instead of shipping mine there and back.
I will spend the summer in Austin, Texas, working in the Mozilla group at IBM.
I will start graduate school at UCSD in September.
I have about 2 days to choose a grad school. I got into UCLA, UCSD, and UO.
When I applied to grad schools, I said that I enjoy doing research in computational complexity. That could change, since I've only had half a course on complexity (I understand P, NP and NP-completeness, and PSPACE and PSPACE-completeness). I might end up doing research in Algorithms (parallel? randomized?), Cryptography, HCI, HCI ⋂ Security, Programming Languages, or Programming Languages ⋂ Security.
I visited UO last week and had a great time. Many UO CS grad students play chess and settlers, hike, and have senses of humor I agree with. Most of them speak English. On Saturday, Peter (a Mudd alum) and James took me on a hike up Spencer's Butte, which overlooks Eugene. I feel like I'd have good friends and maybe even be social if I went to UO.
I would probably have fun doing algorithms at UO's Computational Intelligence Research Lab. Right now, they're doing some impressive stuff with... [I'm under NDA and don't know how public this information is]. But I don't know whether CIRL would fund me. And Matt's belief that P = NP scares me, even if he'll settle for merely laying the groundwork for someone else to prove that NP = coNP.
Unfortunately, nobody at UO researches Complexity. Peter went there wanting to study Complexity, but he couldn't find any profs at UO researching Complexity (and his interests changed), so now he's studying graph drawing. I want to at least have the option to study Complexity rather than Algorithms.
I've also visited UCLA and UCSD, but I only spent 6-8 hours visiting each of them. UCSD and UCLA have higher-ranked departments than UO and are closer to home in Palos Verdes. UCSD has an established Algorithms and Complexity group, while UCLA has hired several professors in the last 2 years in an attempt to build a similar group. UCLA seems to be slightly better at Algorithms and UCSD seems to be better at Complexity. Funding at UCLA seemed sketchy, but I might have misinterpreted something.
I think I'm going to go to UCSD.
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