Having been relatively underwater for the last seven weeks or so, I'm relieved, now, to finally have some time to sit and reflect under the breathtakingly blue sky above me, in my favourite concrete patio outside the Civil Engineering building on campus.
February and March have been whirlwinds of romance, logistical coordination, gaining some clarity about my future and, as always, assignments. Very many assignments.
The week immediately after my birthday, I was pleased to receive an offer from Mesosphere, the startup who I interviewed with on my birthday. After some negotiation (negotiating equity in a startup is an unorthodox affair to me, having always worked for large corporates), I signed my offer at the begining of February. Out of the places I'd looked at working when I first came to Berkeley, they seemed like one of the most interesting: fast growing, fascinating technology and somewhere, close to my interests, where I could learn plenty. Plus, they're in San Francisco!
In parallel with this, I withdrew from the startup, UnmannedData, I've been helping build, in varying capacities, since June last year. The plan is help them out as much as possible until graduation but it looked like our funding situation wasn't going to align in a way that would help me support myself after that. Being a international Master's student will leave me with almost nothing in the bank when I finish this program and, having recently started their second business, I can't rely on my immediate family for financial support. This was somewhat emotional - I had invested a not insignificant amount of my time (to the detriment of my health and social life) into the project. Still, a worthy experience and I wish them all the best going forwards.
Around the same time, I kicked off the application process for my California driving license. Having procrastinated hard, I spent just 30 minutes preparing hurriedly for the written test. Luckily, having driven for nearly 9 years back home and being capable of rational thought helped me get through the 36 questions with just 4 wrong. (6 wrong and I would have failed.) The process of visiting the DMV was, as popular opinion suggests, somewhat painful. Despite arriving on time with everything listed on the website, I was told I needed my I-94 admission number - this is an electronic record of entry to the country.
This was easy enough to fetch online on my smartphone. I wrote it down, went back into the office and was told that I needed a printed copy. It was then necessary to hunt down an internet cafe or similar. My first thought was to check out the El Cerrito public library. This opened at noon, and wanting to minimise disruption to my day, I had booked my appointment for 8:30am. Oops.
The next step was then to look for an internet cafe on Yelp. I went to the closest one to discover that it opened at 10. This was not a viable solution. Resigned to wait until then and despairing a little, I looked around. Success! I spotted a Copy Central opposite and cycled safely across the dual carriageway. Arriving in the store, I was happy to see a small cluster of computers with 17" CRT monitors running Windows XP. Sadly, they had a $2 dollar minimum charge for 10 minutes of usage and printing cost 10c per page. Opening up a private browsing session, so as not to accidentally 'auto remember' my passport number, I printed the I94 receipt.
The person before me had decided to print something in landscape and Chrome had handily saved these settings. This meant that my single page receipt printed on two sheets, with one line of text at the top of the second page. Total damage, including tax was ~ $2.31 to print this receipt. Oh well, I returned to the DMV and queued up again.
When I eventually made it to the correct counter, the lady took my paper receipt and typed the long number into their system. She gave the page back to me. It took some self restraint to avoid bringing my palm up to my face.
A few weeks later and after a brief practice run driving a pickup truck around the city of San Francisco (to help a friend move a couch or, as they call them here, a 'love seat'), I went for my 'behind the wheel' test. I had booked a Toyota Yaris (the first car that I owned, loved and eventually drove into the ground back in England) but, rental car agencies basically randomly assign you to the smallest free vehicle they have at the time. In my case, this was a Chrysler 200. This is a mid size sedan, which was actually rather nice to drive, with the usual underwhelming interior but a solid sound system.
My friend and I took the Chrysler up into Marin County and to the beach - making full use of the day rental to go sample the countryside. She, being wary of my rather aggressive driving style, was a little cautious and then a litle carsick as we took the curves back down. On the other hand, we didn't roll off the edge of the cliffs, so I count that as a successful roadtrip.
The next morning I drove up to El Cerrito for my test itself. My instructor, a middle aged man with an odd (read: twisted) sense of humour told me immediately not to drive any differently to normal. Also immediately, I disregarded this advice and drove far more cautiously than I would normally. This test was free of any notable issues - my only minor point being when I gave the incorrect hand signal for stopping a car before we had even begun. (I blame years of cycling where hand up means stop, versus hand down in a car. I may also have been doing this wrong for years.) The test was graded 'excellent' which is possibly the highest score I'm going to receive in any examination this year ;-).
The other significant logistical issue was to apply for OPT - essentially an extension of my F1 student visa which will let me work in the US for 12 months. Since this is a commitment of a few hundred dollars, I wanted to make absolutely sure I had filled out the documentation correctly. This required two visits to my bank, two visits to a photography shop (apparently a light-coloured shirt on a white background may be rejected for being low contrast?) and several visits to the international office. In the end, it was all submitted quickly and receipt was acknowledged by the USCIS. Fingers crossed that the application is accepted and I'll be able to start work in early to mid June.
The courses this semester are going well. The work load is about as high as last year but is more evenly distributed amongst my courses. Our parallel computing course is great fun and I'm enjoying writing c++ code (*gasp*), and, especially, having access to a NERSC supercomputer. My favourite email of the last few weeks was being told that a watch command I had kicked off and forgotten to terminate was slowing down the job scheduler. Oops.
The other CS course I'm taking is the 'Introduction to Machine Learning' course. This is a crosslisted graduate and undergraduate course and I feel the pain of the undergraduates at Berkeley. The sheer number of them in this class is huge and the scale at which teaching happens here makes it very hard for undergraduates to necessarily get the support that I used to back at Cambridge. There are about 300 students in this class and many students were rejected arbitrarily, based on their performance in another course. Many didn't know about this requirement and so I can see how they might feel aggrieved - paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and majoring in computer science, yet unable to take a fairly pivotal class. The system is broken.
It's now mid March. In very slightly over two months, this course will be finished. My parents, aunt and cousin will arrive for a long weekend to see graduation and with any luck, Phil and I will be cycling from San Francisco to either Yosemite or San Diego. The next two months are going to be a rollercoaster and will probably violate my caffeine consumption tolerance by some and then some more. It's been a fun adventure so far and it doesn't look likely to stop soon.
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3 comments posted so far
Wayne Woodward wrote at 10:05 pm on Wed 12th Mar -
Sounds like business as usual for you Sunil. Hope all continues to go well for you.
Karen Reilly wrote at 10:03 pm on Tue 20th May -
Sunil, congratulations on your recent graduation and I wish you all the best for the future in the states. Don't neglect your photography because when you are my age you will look back on all of your travel memories and experiences with great fondness. I always check 500px and appreciate your eye for composition.
Franz wrote at 1:39 am on Wed 9th Jul -
My dear fellow Geek...and cyclist.
I thought you would be interested in this new invention, a bicyle radar, that gives cyclists a sixth sense! (http://crowd.backtracker.io)
Would love to know what you think!
I thought you would be interested in this new invention, a bicyle radar, that gives cyclists a sixth sense! (http://crowd.backtracker.io)
Would love to know what you think!
The official beginning of another (and my final) semester at UC Berkeley coincided almost exactly with my 26th birthday, starting the day before - a Tuesday, since Monday was a public holiday (Martin Luther King day). I say the official beginning because, as an Master of Engineering student, our 'Engineering Leadership' course (i.e., the more MBA-esque portion of our program) began a week earlier, on the 13th of January.
My winter plans kept me rather busy (although not necessarily in the most productive sense). A flight back to London was followed by a flight to Enfidha, Tunisia and a short coach ride to the Hammamet Beach Resort. My sister, cousin and I were the youngest guests in the 'adult only' beach resort. Tunisia, being in the northern hemisphere, some distance from the equator and adjacent to the Mediterranean sea, was cool. As a beach resort, this rendered the main attraction of the hotel mostly uncomfortable, although still somewhat scenic.
We spent our energies instead on eating well and plenty (as our family holidays always tend to focus on, much to my horror). Taking advantage of the comfy beds, I decided to simultaneously avoid adjusting to the time zone (GMT + 1, 9 hours to the east of Berkeley) and to kick the caffeine habit I picked up in my first four months in America. This went moderately successfully for a few days, sleeping during the day and working a small amount at night. The cold I had picked up in Seattle (through my attempt to 'man up' and 'brave the weather') was on its way out and I was being moderately productive.
Eventually though, my self confidence overtook me and I decided to try one of the local beer bottles in the minifridge - included in our all-inclusive package. This was a foolish move and I quickly regretted it, as I spent half of the next day nautious and the rest of it with a temperate fever. Logical reasoning suggests that most guests were not all-inclusive and as such that bottle had been in the fridge for a very long time. While the contents may have been perfectly safe, it's unclear what unfortunate pathogens had taken up residence on its exterior.
I mostly recovered though, by the time the New Year's Eve celebrations rolled around. The hotel celebrations were predictably underwhelming (running at 40% occupancy, they had neither the guests nor the staff to throw a truly exciting party) but it was very pleasant to spent it with my parents, sister, cousin, aunt and uncle. A local Tunisian band took turns with the hotel activities coordinator and/or DJ to play music. Sadly, their music was less danceable (to the point where all the guests sat down) and they had somehow negotiated the right to play the slot leading up to and including the countdown. It was a very sedentary change of the year.
Later we hung out with some acquaintances of my sister's until the small hours of the morning. You know it's a small world when you run into a Dutch friend in Tunisia who you first met at a hot springs in New Zealand, in your summer holiday from university in Australia while back for Christmas in London. Aside from a potentially embarassing encounter with a belly dancer (avoided by grouping together and collectively bearing the embarassment of dancing with this terrifyingly woman), the hotel 'club' was notable. It was notable because of the installation of UV lights combined with unclean seats. I stood for the short time we spent there. (Interestingly, gin and tonics grow green under UV.)
Another flight back to London's Gatwick and 2014 had truly begun. Within the space of a week I met with approximately 40 odd friends and family, packed up my bike, computer and tried to avoid feeling too homesick. The reality of living away from home in somewhere that is as busy as Berkeley is that home is out of sight and truly out of mind - as there is minimal spare mental capacity. While I still am very happy with life in the Bay Area, being back home made me realise that there were elements of my 'old' life, in England, that hadn't made it with me to California. Most notably, family, but also just the comfort of the house I grew up in, the extent to which I knew parts of London extremely comprehensively and really, the hot chocolate in Europe which is so much better than here in California.
A lot had changed over the preceding few months, my little cousins had grown at least 10% each. At the same, much hadn't changed. Many of my university and school friends hadn't really changed too much. They may have gone on yet another interesting middle class holiday, picked up a new car, or become engaged to their long time girlfriends but otherwise, nothing really interesting had happened. Where's the adventure, friends? :)
My flight back to San Francisco was made wonderfully enjoyable again by the kind Virgin Atlantic staff. When my seat reservation was lost on check-in, I brought this up and they graciously offered me an exit row seat as compensation. I mentioned while doing so that I'd always wanted to sit in the economy cabin on the upper deck. Apparently the timing of this comment was just about right because two hours later, I was sitting in the exit row on the upper deck of a Boeing 747, chatting to a ballet director about his work and enjoying the 4 feet of leg room in front of me!
Landing in San Francisco, my experience collecting and moving my possessions was less intense than the first time I came to Berkeley - primarily because they fit on one trolley. Renting a car worked out cheaper than a taxi (and taking my luggage on the BART was not an option) and, feeling very American, I filled a Jeep Patriot with my luggage and drove into the traffic on the Bay Bridge.
The jetlag and tiredness from the week of running around London caught up to me the next week and combined with my hypothyroidism and newly implemented caffeine-free principle to make it a truly lethargic one. Eventually, I went to the doctor to get my thyroid levels checked. The test results came back 'OK' (although they checked just one level, how's that for a lack of comprehensiveness) but I took the opportunity to ask if it would be better to take my medication in the evening. The substitude physician at the Tang Center mentioned that there was no harm in doing so but she was not aware of any increased efficacy. Three words into Google later, I found two papers (2007 and 2010) suggesting a statistically significant benefit in doing so. Sigh.
The day after returning to Berkeley, I had the pleasure of interviewing at a startup whom I first contacted last semester and who told me to get back in touch with them in the new year. As soon as January rolled around, I sent them an email and they duly set up a first 'interview'. Being just 9 employees, they have a wonderful office which is a converted 'loft' - essentially a three story house in San Francisco where the bedrooms house engineers working, rather than sleeping. This went well and, mentioning my expiring offer, they quickly booked another interview. Sadly, the only day I had free from class happened to be my birthday.
The chronological boundaries of my birthday was somewhat blurred, as my sister wished me as it hit midnight in Australia (19 hours ahead of Berkeley) and then my cousin mistakenly wished me 'Happy Birthday' on Facebook. A few friends panicked and wished me a happy birthday by which time Facebook's News Feed algorithm had picked up that people were wishing me a happy birthday in volume and started advertising that fact to my other friends. This only accelerated the process.
On my birthday itself though, I woke up after just a few hours sleep (caused by work, not the onslaught of birthday notifications) and pedalled down to the BART station. At the roundabout or 'traffic circle' near our house, I narrowly avoided a rather ironic death on my birthday when a moronic driver decided that he wouldn't yield at the roundabout and took it at full speed (~ 40 mph). Thank god I'd readjusted my brakes the previous weekend else the roundabout would be bearing rather more visible marks of that encounter than just rubber on the road.
The final interview went badly, at first, and then better. My favourite portion was talking about Canadian folk rock bands with their UX designer - aren't startups cool? Lunch was a sampling of deli meats, cheese and some warm bread. This was pure class.
After a stressful session at the lab, where an important meeting we had been waiting for apparently materialised sooner than expected (and threatened to derail my evening plans). Thankfully, we were able to reschedule it and I wandered off downtown to have dinner with my two awesome flatmates at Saturn, a vegetarian restaurant, that services "chicken" burgers. Note the quotation marks.
Arriving home, a number of packages ordered by my parents were present - including an entire cookie cake which, sadly but deliciously, no longer exists.
On Friday, I had a rather excellent birthday party at the Albatross Pub, not far from the North Berkeley BART station. At first there were just three of us holding a large table to ourselves. Some more people soon arrived and then some more. Eventually we took over nearly the entirety of the back room of the bar and it was great fun catching up with everyone, albeit too brief. My friend Amy amusingly summarised it best when she said, 'I'm amazed that you have so many friends here.' I am too, and rather glad for it.
My winter plans kept me rather busy (although not necessarily in the most productive sense). A flight back to London was followed by a flight to Enfidha, Tunisia and a short coach ride to the Hammamet Beach Resort. My sister, cousin and I were the youngest guests in the 'adult only' beach resort. Tunisia, being in the northern hemisphere, some distance from the equator and adjacent to the Mediterranean sea, was cool. As a beach resort, this rendered the main attraction of the hotel mostly uncomfortable, although still somewhat scenic.
We spent our energies instead on eating well and plenty (as our family holidays always tend to focus on, much to my horror). Taking advantage of the comfy beds, I decided to simultaneously avoid adjusting to the time zone (GMT + 1, 9 hours to the east of Berkeley) and to kick the caffeine habit I picked up in my first four months in America. This went moderately successfully for a few days, sleeping during the day and working a small amount at night. The cold I had picked up in Seattle (through my attempt to 'man up' and 'brave the weather') was on its way out and I was being moderately productive.
Eventually though, my self confidence overtook me and I decided to try one of the local beer bottles in the minifridge - included in our all-inclusive package. This was a foolish move and I quickly regretted it, as I spent half of the next day nautious and the rest of it with a temperate fever. Logical reasoning suggests that most guests were not all-inclusive and as such that bottle had been in the fridge for a very long time. While the contents may have been perfectly safe, it's unclear what unfortunate pathogens had taken up residence on its exterior.
I mostly recovered though, by the time the New Year's Eve celebrations rolled around. The hotel celebrations were predictably underwhelming (running at 40% occupancy, they had neither the guests nor the staff to throw a truly exciting party) but it was very pleasant to spent it with my parents, sister, cousin, aunt and uncle. A local Tunisian band took turns with the hotel activities coordinator and/or DJ to play music. Sadly, their music was less danceable (to the point where all the guests sat down) and they had somehow negotiated the right to play the slot leading up to and including the countdown. It was a very sedentary change of the year.
Later we hung out with some acquaintances of my sister's until the small hours of the morning. You know it's a small world when you run into a Dutch friend in Tunisia who you first met at a hot springs in New Zealand, in your summer holiday from university in Australia while back for Christmas in London. Aside from a potentially embarassing encounter with a belly dancer (avoided by grouping together and collectively bearing the embarassment of dancing with this terrifyingly woman), the hotel 'club' was notable. It was notable because of the installation of UV lights combined with unclean seats. I stood for the short time we spent there. (Interestingly, gin and tonics grow green under UV.)
Another flight back to London's Gatwick and 2014 had truly begun. Within the space of a week I met with approximately 40 odd friends and family, packed up my bike, computer and tried to avoid feeling too homesick. The reality of living away from home in somewhere that is as busy as Berkeley is that home is out of sight and truly out of mind - as there is minimal spare mental capacity. While I still am very happy with life in the Bay Area, being back home made me realise that there were elements of my 'old' life, in England, that hadn't made it with me to California. Most notably, family, but also just the comfort of the house I grew up in, the extent to which I knew parts of London extremely comprehensively and really, the hot chocolate in Europe which is so much better than here in California.
A lot had changed over the preceding few months, my little cousins had grown at least 10% each. At the same, much hadn't changed. Many of my university and school friends hadn't really changed too much. They may have gone on yet another interesting middle class holiday, picked up a new car, or become engaged to their long time girlfriends but otherwise, nothing really interesting had happened. Where's the adventure, friends? :)
My flight back to San Francisco was made wonderfully enjoyable again by the kind Virgin Atlantic staff. When my seat reservation was lost on check-in, I brought this up and they graciously offered me an exit row seat as compensation. I mentioned while doing so that I'd always wanted to sit in the economy cabin on the upper deck. Apparently the timing of this comment was just about right because two hours later, I was sitting in the exit row on the upper deck of a Boeing 747, chatting to a ballet director about his work and enjoying the 4 feet of leg room in front of me!
Landing in San Francisco, my experience collecting and moving my possessions was less intense than the first time I came to Berkeley - primarily because they fit on one trolley. Renting a car worked out cheaper than a taxi (and taking my luggage on the BART was not an option) and, feeling very American, I filled a Jeep Patriot with my luggage and drove into the traffic on the Bay Bridge.
The jetlag and tiredness from the week of running around London caught up to me the next week and combined with my hypothyroidism and newly implemented caffeine-free principle to make it a truly lethargic one. Eventually, I went to the doctor to get my thyroid levels checked. The test results came back 'OK' (although they checked just one level, how's that for a lack of comprehensiveness) but I took the opportunity to ask if it would be better to take my medication in the evening. The substitude physician at the Tang Center mentioned that there was no harm in doing so but she was not aware of any increased efficacy. Three words into Google later, I found two papers (2007 and 2010) suggesting a statistically significant benefit in doing so. Sigh.
The day after returning to Berkeley, I had the pleasure of interviewing at a startup whom I first contacted last semester and who told me to get back in touch with them in the new year. As soon as January rolled around, I sent them an email and they duly set up a first 'interview'. Being just 9 employees, they have a wonderful office which is a converted 'loft' - essentially a three story house in San Francisco where the bedrooms house engineers working, rather than sleeping. This went well and, mentioning my expiring offer, they quickly booked another interview. Sadly, the only day I had free from class happened to be my birthday.
The chronological boundaries of my birthday was somewhat blurred, as my sister wished me as it hit midnight in Australia (19 hours ahead of Berkeley) and then my cousin mistakenly wished me 'Happy Birthday' on Facebook. A few friends panicked and wished me a happy birthday by which time Facebook's News Feed algorithm had picked up that people were wishing me a happy birthday in volume and started advertising that fact to my other friends. This only accelerated the process.
On my birthday itself though, I woke up after just a few hours sleep (caused by work, not the onslaught of birthday notifications) and pedalled down to the BART station. At the roundabout or 'traffic circle' near our house, I narrowly avoided a rather ironic death on my birthday when a moronic driver decided that he wouldn't yield at the roundabout and took it at full speed (~ 40 mph). Thank god I'd readjusted my brakes the previous weekend else the roundabout would be bearing rather more visible marks of that encounter than just rubber on the road.
The final interview went badly, at first, and then better. My favourite portion was talking about Canadian folk rock bands with their UX designer - aren't startups cool? Lunch was a sampling of deli meats, cheese and some warm bread. This was pure class.
After a stressful session at the lab, where an important meeting we had been waiting for apparently materialised sooner than expected (and threatened to derail my evening plans). Thankfully, we were able to reschedule it and I wandered off downtown to have dinner with my two awesome flatmates at Saturn, a vegetarian restaurant, that services "chicken" burgers. Note the quotation marks.
Arriving home, a number of packages ordered by my parents were present - including an entire cookie cake which, sadly but deliciously, no longer exists.
On Friday, I had a rather excellent birthday party at the Albatross Pub, not far from the North Berkeley BART station. At first there were just three of us holding a large table to ourselves. Some more people soon arrived and then some more. Eventually we took over nearly the entirety of the back room of the bar and it was great fun catching up with everyone, albeit too brief. My friend Amy amusingly summarised it best when she said, 'I'm amazed that you have so many friends here.' I am too, and rather glad for it.
2 comments posted so far
m wrote at 8:31 am on Mon 27th Jan -
it's Martin LUTHER King
SS wrote at 4:10 am on Tue 4th Feb -
Whoops! Sorry!
I'm taking the week off. Or at least, taking it a little easier than the last few weeks. Semester is pretty much over. I have an extra credit assignment that I'm supposed to be working on for robotics (it's the difference between an A- and an A grade: my American friends tell me an A is desirable) but it's proving difficult to get started on. I have today to do as much as I can on it - tomorrow I fly out to Seattle for a couple of nights to interview with Amazon.
Soon after I last wrote, 3 weeks ago, I flew to Miami for Thanksgiving (and was trapped there for an extra day when US Airways couldn't handle a blown tyre with any sort of speed). That was wonderful, considerably less productive than I had hoped but it was great to see my family and to experience the Floridian climate.
On Thursday, after napping a little and eating a lot, we went out to experience the Black Friday sales. I picked up a rather nice red sweater and was amused at the frenzy of commercial activity. The next day, my two cousins and I drove down to Key West for a night. I was both bemused and horrified by the attempts of local shopowners to capitalise on being located at the southernmost part of the continental United States.
Key West itself was a nice enough place, being both expensive and somewhat superficial. However, after you acclimatise to that, it has a decent assortment of bars with live music, good food (sadly mostly seafood) and giant cookies being sold every other block.
After returning from Key West, we went for a brief expedition down to Miami Beach. We didn't manage to go to any of the clubs or bars but it was an interesting walk down Ocean Drive. There's something about live music on/near the beach which gets me every time - my favourite 'night out' was New Year's Eve in Mombasa, where a giant rave is hosted by DJ group 6AM on the beach. Miami Beach was similar, the calm of the sea is adjacent to several huge clubs and separated only by the road. Plus, everyone in Miami Beach is beautiful (perhaps correlated with their income levels - there were a LOT of nice cars around).
On Sunday I slept, worked a little and ate some more. My aunt had generously bought a bottle of Amarula and none of my family there wanted it. I had to oblige and finish as much of the bottle as possible.
The journey back was somewhat tedious - after boarding the plane on Monday, we were taxi-ing out to the runway when one of the tyres blew. I had booked a connecting flight from Charlotte to San Francisco which left an hour after we arrived. They estimated that it would take 90 minutes to change the tyre. Being Thanksgiving, there were no flights available that day to San Francisco and eventually they were able to rebook me on a flight with Delta the following day. After waiting for my luggage to be offloaded for 3 hours, I took a taxi back to my aunt's house and slept a little more.
On the eventual flight back to San Francisco, I loaded up on caffeine and coded a state machine for our automated quadcopter landing class project. This was interesting because I've never written any C++ before and without access to internet on the plane, I was reliant on a couple of PDF textbooks I'd 'acquired' beforehand. By the time I landed, I had some semblence of a working controller - albeit with just shy of a hundred compile errors.
The next couple of weeks were spend trying to get this controller integrated with my colleagues' computer vision pose estimation code. Just as we did get it all working together, the day before our final project presentation, the weather gods decided to throw a fork in the works and the wind was gusting 35 miles per hour. Our unoptimised controller had no chance.
Still, we had a mildly entertaining presentation and had plenty to write about in our report. On Friday, my flatmates and I hosted a Christmas 'house warming' party which was excellent fun. My fondest memory of the evening is when a guest of ours decided to bring his beer bottle up to the roof and then promptly dropped it. It slid down our roof and came to a resounding crash on the ground below. The next day it took about 25 minutes to pick all the microscopic shards of glass off of the pathway in between our house and the next.
On Saturday I went to see Handel's Messiah for free with a friend of mine (having entered and won a raffle hosted by Cal Startups). This was a little out of my usual comfort zone - I primarily enjoy modern instrumental classical music and this was baroque choral music. It was entertaining for the first hour or so but quickly grew tiring (perhaps compounding the 5 hours sleep post Christmas party).
This Sunday I spent preparing for my accounting final. The material wasn't difficult but was some of the most boring material I've ever revised: I had three times as many naps as a typical Sunday. After this finished on Monday, I came home and slept for 3 hours. This week is definitely going to be all about taking it easy.
Soon after I last wrote, 3 weeks ago, I flew to Miami for Thanksgiving (and was trapped there for an extra day when US Airways couldn't handle a blown tyre with any sort of speed). That was wonderful, considerably less productive than I had hoped but it was great to see my family and to experience the Floridian climate.
On Thursday, after napping a little and eating a lot, we went out to experience the Black Friday sales. I picked up a rather nice red sweater and was amused at the frenzy of commercial activity. The next day, my two cousins and I drove down to Key West for a night. I was both bemused and horrified by the attempts of local shopowners to capitalise on being located at the southernmost part of the continental United States.
Key West itself was a nice enough place, being both expensive and somewhat superficial. However, after you acclimatise to that, it has a decent assortment of bars with live music, good food (sadly mostly seafood) and giant cookies being sold every other block.
After returning from Key West, we went for a brief expedition down to Miami Beach. We didn't manage to go to any of the clubs or bars but it was an interesting walk down Ocean Drive. There's something about live music on/near the beach which gets me every time - my favourite 'night out' was New Year's Eve in Mombasa, where a giant rave is hosted by DJ group 6AM on the beach. Miami Beach was similar, the calm of the sea is adjacent to several huge clubs and separated only by the road. Plus, everyone in Miami Beach is beautiful (perhaps correlated with their income levels - there were a LOT of nice cars around).
On Sunday I slept, worked a little and ate some more. My aunt had generously bought a bottle of Amarula and none of my family there wanted it. I had to oblige and finish as much of the bottle as possible.
The journey back was somewhat tedious - after boarding the plane on Monday, we were taxi-ing out to the runway when one of the tyres blew. I had booked a connecting flight from Charlotte to San Francisco which left an hour after we arrived. They estimated that it would take 90 minutes to change the tyre. Being Thanksgiving, there were no flights available that day to San Francisco and eventually they were able to rebook me on a flight with Delta the following day. After waiting for my luggage to be offloaded for 3 hours, I took a taxi back to my aunt's house and slept a little more.
On the eventual flight back to San Francisco, I loaded up on caffeine and coded a state machine for our automated quadcopter landing class project. This was interesting because I've never written any C++ before and without access to internet on the plane, I was reliant on a couple of PDF textbooks I'd 'acquired' beforehand. By the time I landed, I had some semblence of a working controller - albeit with just shy of a hundred compile errors.
The next couple of weeks were spend trying to get this controller integrated with my colleagues' computer vision pose estimation code. Just as we did get it all working together, the day before our final project presentation, the weather gods decided to throw a fork in the works and the wind was gusting 35 miles per hour. Our unoptimised controller had no chance.
Still, we had a mildly entertaining presentation and had plenty to write about in our report. On Friday, my flatmates and I hosted a Christmas 'house warming' party which was excellent fun. My fondest memory of the evening is when a guest of ours decided to bring his beer bottle up to the roof and then promptly dropped it. It slid down our roof and came to a resounding crash on the ground below. The next day it took about 25 minutes to pick all the microscopic shards of glass off of the pathway in between our house and the next.
On Saturday I went to see Handel's Messiah for free with a friend of mine (having entered and won a raffle hosted by Cal Startups). This was a little out of my usual comfort zone - I primarily enjoy modern instrumental classical music and this was baroque choral music. It was entertaining for the first hour or so but quickly grew tiring (perhaps compounding the 5 hours sleep post Christmas party).
This Sunday I spent preparing for my accounting final. The material wasn't difficult but was some of the most boring material I've ever revised: I had three times as many naps as a typical Sunday. After this finished on Monday, I came home and slept for 3 hours. This week is definitely going to be all about taking it easy.
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In a stunning return to form (or at least to adhering to my weekly recurring task on Wunderlist), I'm blogging just a week after my last post! The past week has been a series of frustrations, minor successes and occasionally causes for major introspection.
On Monday, shortly after I posted my last entry, I met with one of the companies whose offer I had turned down. My major qualms were not the nature of the work but more the culture of the company. This is a hard thing to say without appearing shallow but having worked in both a large corporate and a small tech company (within a larger corporate) - I know how much of a difference that makes. When I went in to visit their office, I was reminded very acutely of Dilbert's office. My attempt to express my reservations about working there seemed to fall on deaf ears. When I mentioned the proximity to San Francisco that was desirable to me, as well as living in a place with the cultural backdrop of Berkeley, they dismissed my concerns and suggested that San Jose might be comparable...
Moving on, Tuesday was an equally unfulfilling day - my co-founders (slight shudder at using such a cliched term but I suppose there's no accurate other way to describe people I'm hoping to start a business with) and I had a series of meetings to scope out our project. This is a turbulent process that, if it is getting us to an end point, seems to be going painfully slowly. Discontent seems to be amplified by a failure to communicate between a couple of members of my team. It's not clear how the best way to deal with this is - both make valid points but just can't seem to work together without ending up arguing over an irrelevant detail. So far I've been trying to act as interpreter but that isn't a sustainable process.
That day was redeemed by meeting David (a university friend and former colleague at BarCap) and his co-founder Chris - who had just interviewed for YCombinator's Winter 2014 class (and been accepted!). They stayed over in Berkeley and it was great to hear about their entrepreneurial journey so far. I'm looking forward to seeing them again in January while they work on growing their startup, Sketch Deck.
On Wednesday I had an interesting set of discussions with my capstone project team as we tried to assess the scope of our project. With nearly all of semester over now, we're pretty far behind on our project. Given the FAA roadmap for UAS integration that was published recently - our project's ambition, to come up with a commercial application for UAS technology, was called into question. We've now decided to pivot the idea to something more likely to be (legally) permitted but, wow, that was a tough discussion.
That evening, three of us went to the Global Social Venture Competition's mixer at the Hub in San Francisco. GSVC is a business plan competition with a $25,000 prize for ventures that have a strong social or environmental impact. They don't necessarily have to be non-profit organisations. We weren't planning to pitch but about 70% of the people who signed up to pitch didn't show up - so with 3 minutes notice, I scribed a few sentences on my phone and put my hand up. Evidently I was outwardly more nervous in appearance than I felt because both of my colleagues mentioned that I looked visibly shaken as I spoke. Still, this was a good hit of adrenaline and hopefully good practice for future events.
On Thursday, Last.fm released their new radio player which now sources tracks directly from YouTube. This decision makes perfect sense from a business point of view - they've been at the mercy of record labels since they started operating a streaming music business. Deferring that responsibility away to YouTube/Google (who have a much stronger bargaining position) simplifies operations considerably. The 20+ expensive servers that ran our streaming service can be retired, as well as the five or so machines that we used for ingesting content. Sadly, however, this means that the majority of the work I did on the ingestion system over the past two years is now redundant.
It's a morose feeling but this sort of churn is normal in the tech community. My first internship at BarCap was with a team that wrote software for the mortgage backed securities loans team around about the time (in 2008) when that whole industry was going under. It's a depressing feeling knowing that the work you've done is essentially going to be thrown away. On the other hand, the fact that this can be done so easily perhaps explains why the software industry is able to be continually innovative. I'm glad I was able to leave when I did - having to decommission the ingestion system would be partially like saying a permanent goodbye to a loved one.
While contemplating my role in building redundant technology, I journeyed to the UCSF Parnassus campus to see an ophthamologist for a follow-up to my eye surgery in April. It feels as if the acuity of my eyesight has declined considerably since arriving in Berkeley but unexpectedly he mentioned that, while my prescription has changed, it is neither better nor for the worse. There's a cruel irony in the location of the Beckman Eye Center at UCSF - it's on a hill overlooking San Francisco and has one of the grandest views I've seen through these eyes of mine. I hope that all their patients eventually get to admire the view.
With eyes dilated, I journeyed back to Berkeley (almost missing my stop, for lack of being able to see) to continue more project work.
On Friday evening, we had a 'masked' ball, organised by the wonderful CS grad social association. It was an interesting evening but finished in a way that led me to reconsider my notions of gentlemanness, perhaps unduly so. Some wine was drunk, perhaps not enough to sway a hardened alcoholic like myself (I jest) but enough to make a friend very ill. It was decided that someone should accompany that friend home, and given the insobrietry of the majority of the group that was accompanying my friend, I decided to tag along, for extra support (literally) mainly.
On the way there, walking down an unlit residential street at the darkest hour of the night, I managed to not see that a Berkeley denizen had lined the front of his lawn with multiple large rocks. Tripping over the first, I landed face first onto a further rock, striking my left knee and left cheek with the sharp features of a couple of rocks. Ouch. I'll recover of course, much worse has happened to me.
Limping home, I started to question the point of such quaint chivalry. It's likely that had I not been there, their journey home would probably have been just fine. I would have reached my home quicker and uninjured. Was accompanying them the proper thing to do? Sure. But it clearly wasn't the most optimal decision for me. I'll think more carefully in the future.
The week concluded with an early morning attempt on Saturday to fetch groceries from Berkeley Bowl, including the ingredients to make the paleo (gluten free, artifical sugar free) cookies I enjoy so much. Everything was on track to make some beautifully soft and tasty cookies with peanut butter chips and matcha inside when I decided to pop them in the oven for a little longer to 'harden' up. Meanwhile, my freshly dried laundry was calling to be folded and I went to fold my 21 odd colourful Threadless t-shirts. Not more than 5 minutes later, I returned to the disappointing smell of burned cookies. The next hour was spent cutting carbon out of the cookies and I concluded that perhaps I should try and do a little less concurrently in the future.
On Monday, shortly after I posted my last entry, I met with one of the companies whose offer I had turned down. My major qualms were not the nature of the work but more the culture of the company. This is a hard thing to say without appearing shallow but having worked in both a large corporate and a small tech company (within a larger corporate) - I know how much of a difference that makes. When I went in to visit their office, I was reminded very acutely of Dilbert's office. My attempt to express my reservations about working there seemed to fall on deaf ears. When I mentioned the proximity to San Francisco that was desirable to me, as well as living in a place with the cultural backdrop of Berkeley, they dismissed my concerns and suggested that San Jose might be comparable...
Moving on, Tuesday was an equally unfulfilling day - my co-founders (slight shudder at using such a cliched term but I suppose there's no accurate other way to describe people I'm hoping to start a business with) and I had a series of meetings to scope out our project. This is a turbulent process that, if it is getting us to an end point, seems to be going painfully slowly. Discontent seems to be amplified by a failure to communicate between a couple of members of my team. It's not clear how the best way to deal with this is - both make valid points but just can't seem to work together without ending up arguing over an irrelevant detail. So far I've been trying to act as interpreter but that isn't a sustainable process.
That day was redeemed by meeting David (a university friend and former colleague at BarCap) and his co-founder Chris - who had just interviewed for YCombinator's Winter 2014 class (and been accepted!). They stayed over in Berkeley and it was great to hear about their entrepreneurial journey so far. I'm looking forward to seeing them again in January while they work on growing their startup, Sketch Deck.
On Wednesday I had an interesting set of discussions with my capstone project team as we tried to assess the scope of our project. With nearly all of semester over now, we're pretty far behind on our project. Given the FAA roadmap for UAS integration that was published recently - our project's ambition, to come up with a commercial application for UAS technology, was called into question. We've now decided to pivot the idea to something more likely to be (legally) permitted but, wow, that was a tough discussion.
That evening, three of us went to the Global Social Venture Competition's mixer at the Hub in San Francisco. GSVC is a business plan competition with a $25,000 prize for ventures that have a strong social or environmental impact. They don't necessarily have to be non-profit organisations. We weren't planning to pitch but about 70% of the people who signed up to pitch didn't show up - so with 3 minutes notice, I scribed a few sentences on my phone and put my hand up. Evidently I was outwardly more nervous in appearance than I felt because both of my colleagues mentioned that I looked visibly shaken as I spoke. Still, this was a good hit of adrenaline and hopefully good practice for future events.
On Thursday, Last.fm released their new radio player which now sources tracks directly from YouTube. This decision makes perfect sense from a business point of view - they've been at the mercy of record labels since they started operating a streaming music business. Deferring that responsibility away to YouTube/Google (who have a much stronger bargaining position) simplifies operations considerably. The 20+ expensive servers that ran our streaming service can be retired, as well as the five or so machines that we used for ingesting content. Sadly, however, this means that the majority of the work I did on the ingestion system over the past two years is now redundant.
It's a morose feeling but this sort of churn is normal in the tech community. My first internship at BarCap was with a team that wrote software for the mortgage backed securities loans team around about the time (in 2008) when that whole industry was going under. It's a depressing feeling knowing that the work you've done is essentially going to be thrown away. On the other hand, the fact that this can be done so easily perhaps explains why the software industry is able to be continually innovative. I'm glad I was able to leave when I did - having to decommission the ingestion system would be partially like saying a permanent goodbye to a loved one.
While contemplating my role in building redundant technology, I journeyed to the UCSF Parnassus campus to see an ophthamologist for a follow-up to my eye surgery in April. It feels as if the acuity of my eyesight has declined considerably since arriving in Berkeley but unexpectedly he mentioned that, while my prescription has changed, it is neither better nor for the worse. There's a cruel irony in the location of the Beckman Eye Center at UCSF - it's on a hill overlooking San Francisco and has one of the grandest views I've seen through these eyes of mine. I hope that all their patients eventually get to admire the view.
With eyes dilated, I journeyed back to Berkeley (almost missing my stop, for lack of being able to see) to continue more project work.
On Friday evening, we had a 'masked' ball, organised by the wonderful CS grad social association. It was an interesting evening but finished in a way that led me to reconsider my notions of gentlemanness, perhaps unduly so. Some wine was drunk, perhaps not enough to sway a hardened alcoholic like myself (I jest) but enough to make a friend very ill. It was decided that someone should accompany that friend home, and given the insobrietry of the majority of the group that was accompanying my friend, I decided to tag along, for extra support (literally) mainly.
On the way there, walking down an unlit residential street at the darkest hour of the night, I managed to not see that a Berkeley denizen had lined the front of his lawn with multiple large rocks. Tripping over the first, I landed face first onto a further rock, striking my left knee and left cheek with the sharp features of a couple of rocks. Ouch. I'll recover of course, much worse has happened to me.
Limping home, I started to question the point of such quaint chivalry. It's likely that had I not been there, their journey home would probably have been just fine. I would have reached my home quicker and uninjured. Was accompanying them the proper thing to do? Sure. But it clearly wasn't the most optimal decision for me. I'll think more carefully in the future.
The week concluded with an early morning attempt on Saturday to fetch groceries from Berkeley Bowl, including the ingredients to make the paleo (gluten free, artifical sugar free) cookies I enjoy so much. Everything was on track to make some beautifully soft and tasty cookies with peanut butter chips and matcha inside when I decided to pop them in the oven for a little longer to 'harden' up. Meanwhile, my freshly dried laundry was calling to be folded and I went to fold my 21 odd colourful Threadless t-shirts. Not more than 5 minutes later, I returned to the disappointing smell of burned cookies. The next hour was spent cutting carbon out of the cookies and I concluded that perhaps I should try and do a little less concurrently in the future.
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Three weeks have again flown by since my last update. Currently (to give you some context, since life is all about context) I'm sitting in a coffee shop come bakery - "Speciality's" - in Santa Clara. This afternoon was a final round interview at a great startup. Running through my head for the last few weeks has been a series of elaborate decision making processes as I try to determine what job offer to accept and which to reject.
As I've mentioned earlier, I knew job offers would come more easily to a software engineer in Silicon Valley. In particular, my strategy of selecting employers whose product I know and love and primarily applying to smaller employers has paid off.
As a brief segue, current students looking for graduate entry jobs seem to apply to the big name companies. This makes their job hunt harder since these employers have their pick of graduates and can be more selective. Additionally, I'm skeptical that new engineers in these companies have much leeway to work on projects that interest them.
My friends who know me well know that I have been planning to come study a Master's (in the US) since my last year at Cambridge. While the decisions that I've made since regarding employment, living arrangements and significant others have been made to this objective, I now face a growing amount of uncertainty. There is no obvious next goal and I have several potential routes to achieving the various things that are high up on my list of life ambitions.
My options are: work for an established company, work for a startup, start my own company. The latter of which is the riskiest and brings with it the most financial uncertainty. It is also the most exciting. Within the first two categories, I need to pin down several decisions: whether to work for a consumer or enterprise technology company, whether to work on a product or a service, and whether to work in South Bay or in San Francisco.
Overwhelmingly it feels as if the more exciting consumer focussed companies are in San Francisco - while the enterprise companies are based in South Bay (i.e. Silicon Valley). I love living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco would make it possible to commute in from Berkeley. Working in South Bay would mean I would have to live in South Bay (or commute in from San Francisco). Besides rent being cheaper in Berkeley, it is surrounded by beautiful scenery, I have many friends there and, despite being fairly city-like, it remains very peaceful.
On the other hand, the harder computer science problems seem to be with those companies in South Bay. Working on an actual tech product/problems is something that I've often tried to do in a professional context in the past but struggled to find. Building services in Java often felt like virtual plumbing - taking one library and piping its output into another library or database.
There are a number of sub-decisions to be made here and I need to pick carefully since it's going to affect my life for the near to medium term!
As I've mentioned earlier, I knew job offers would come more easily to a software engineer in Silicon Valley. In particular, my strategy of selecting employers whose product I know and love and primarily applying to smaller employers has paid off.
As a brief segue, current students looking for graduate entry jobs seem to apply to the big name companies. This makes their job hunt harder since these employers have their pick of graduates and can be more selective. Additionally, I'm skeptical that new engineers in these companies have much leeway to work on projects that interest them.
My friends who know me well know that I have been planning to come study a Master's (in the US) since my last year at Cambridge. While the decisions that I've made since regarding employment, living arrangements and significant others have been made to this objective, I now face a growing amount of uncertainty. There is no obvious next goal and I have several potential routes to achieving the various things that are high up on my list of life ambitions.
My options are: work for an established company, work for a startup, start my own company. The latter of which is the riskiest and brings with it the most financial uncertainty. It is also the most exciting. Within the first two categories, I need to pin down several decisions: whether to work for a consumer or enterprise technology company, whether to work on a product or a service, and whether to work in South Bay or in San Francisco.
Overwhelmingly it feels as if the more exciting consumer focussed companies are in San Francisco - while the enterprise companies are based in South Bay (i.e. Silicon Valley). I love living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco would make it possible to commute in from Berkeley. Working in South Bay would mean I would have to live in South Bay (or commute in from San Francisco). Besides rent being cheaper in Berkeley, it is surrounded by beautiful scenery, I have many friends there and, despite being fairly city-like, it remains very peaceful.
On the other hand, the harder computer science problems seem to be with those companies in South Bay. Working on an actual tech product/problems is something that I've often tried to do in a professional context in the past but struggled to find. Building services in Java often felt like virtual plumbing - taking one library and piping its output into another library or database.
There are a number of sub-decisions to be made here and I need to pick carefully since it's going to affect my life for the near to medium term!
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We were forwarded the blurb below. Essentially, build our product for us and we'll take 82% of the equity because we came up with the idea. I was much amused-
HAAS TEAM IN SEARCH OF ENGINEER!
We are a group of 5 Haas students who are currently in a process of developing a p2p mobile app. We have already recruited a team of interns who are eager to start working under the leadership of a new VP of Engineering.
We have skills in marketing, interface design, business development, investment research, and statistical analysis.
New *** venture, ******, seeks Cofounder/VP Engineering to spearhead development of a mobile software platform with peer-to-peer functionality. This is a straightforward project and we are aiming to get an efficiently working prototype completed by the week of Nov 22. We have proof of concept and market research. Now we simply need to build and sell. We are advised by a founder of Berkeley's CET and a venture capitalist, who also teaches at Cal.
Compensation is a 1/6 share of total equity in a pool of five other founders!
You should be passionate about programming, able to demonstrate your skills, and ready to work as a team to grow a successful startup in the sharing economy (i.e. Lyft, AirBnB, ZipCar).
Skills needed:
- demonstrable experience with coding mobile software
- experience with peer-to-peer functionality
- ability to develop application for both Android and iOS
- ability to build and lead a software development team (of interns to start)
- willingness to follow Agile development process
- self-motivated, sense of urgency
- team mentality, results oriented, goal driven
- strong time management skills and ability to commit to co-located work hours
- as cofounder, ability to work in a business development team to grow the company quickly
- excellent communication skills
- true passion for the startup environment and building mobile apps
HAAS TEAM IN SEARCH OF ENGINEER!
We are a group of 5 Haas students who are currently in a process of developing a p2p mobile app. We have already recruited a team of interns who are eager to start working under the leadership of a new VP of Engineering.
We have skills in marketing, interface design, business development, investment research, and statistical analysis.
New *** venture, ******, seeks Cofounder/VP Engineering to spearhead development of a mobile software platform with peer-to-peer functionality. This is a straightforward project and we are aiming to get an efficiently working prototype completed by the week of Nov 22. We have proof of concept and market research. Now we simply need to build and sell. We are advised by a founder of Berkeley's CET and a venture capitalist, who also teaches at Cal.
Compensation is a 1/6 share of total equity in a pool of five other founders!
You should be passionate about programming, able to demonstrate your skills, and ready to work as a team to grow a successful startup in the sharing economy (i.e. Lyft, AirBnB, ZipCar).
Skills needed:
- demonstrable experience with coding mobile software
- experience with peer-to-peer functionality
- ability to develop application for both Android and iOS
- ability to build and lead a software development team (of interns to start)
- willingness to follow Agile development process
- self-motivated, sense of urgency
- team mentality, results oriented, goal driven
- strong time management skills and ability to commit to co-located work hours
- as cofounder, ability to work in a business development team to grow the company quickly
- excellent communication skills
- true passion for the startup environment and building mobile apps
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As I mentioned previously, I was offered the fantastic opportunity to give Neal Stephenson a lift to Oakland airport on his way home after a panel session at UC Berkeley. Rather than asking him about something particular to his work, I thought I'd ask him about how he gets stuff done. It's a topic that I'm continuously fascinated with - being both a complete data junkie and a pathological procrastinator. As an author who is clearly very productive, I was curious as to how he does it. Accompanying me was Constantin, a PhD student at UC Berkeley.
Turns out the treadmill desk in REAMDE wasn't entirely fictional - Neal actually uses one of these to work on. Apparently a low walking speed makes it possible to type and work. A wrist rest is necessary to dampen the side to side rocking of your wrists as you walk. For work where he's handwriting, he uses a standing desk (since it's not possible to handwrite while walking).
I previously noted the curious coffee shop culture in the US and was curious if Neal adhered to the cafe-author stereotype. He mentioned that he didn't - preferring an atmosphere of quiet and to stay in one place (I recall libraries being mentioned). If he needs to use a lot of his notes and materials, he needs to be at home with a desk to lay things out.
Generally he doesn't like travelling to speaking arrangements since it can be quite disruptive to getting work done. Not only the actual time spent travelling and speaking but also the communication overhead that goes into organising an event.
He works in the morning normally - and stops as soon as he feels his alertness tailing off. Most of the time he writes a paragraph well enough the first time. As he said, 'editing a work of literature is like performing surgery on a human body. There are always scars and seams left over.'
All of his work eventually hits a computer - either in LaTeX or, lately, using Mac writing application Scrivener. Occasionally he'll handwrite work - work that is handwritten tends to be better thought through since there's a longer buffer between his thoughts and putting them to paper (since handwriting is slower).
I asked him how he felt about this world of push notifications - where we are pinged quickly with every new bit of information - tweet, news article or email. He says that he just has those turned off since his job doesn't require continuous notification. I would suggest that that's probably true of most jobs - we're just addicted to the small dopamine hit that accompanies each notification. Perhaps that will be the next life hack I try to implement.
With such incredibly intricate story lines and characters, I was curious how he organises his research. Supposedly he doesn't have a definitive scheme, preferring to keep notes organised randomly. This is apparently useful to allow ideas and notes to cross-pollinate others as he searches for the notes he wants.
Finally, I was curious how he keeps his work from getting eaten by his computer. Supposedly he backs up to a RAID in the basement and to a USB stick every two weeks.
On a final note - it was a pleasure to meet the man himself. I took a hiatus from reading serious amounts of fiction for most of my late teens, as I became more immersed in my cycling hobby. As I left Cambridge, I started reading fiction again and started off with his novels. I've not stopped since.
Work Environment
Turns out the treadmill desk in REAMDE wasn't entirely fictional - Neal actually uses one of these to work on. Apparently a low walking speed makes it possible to type and work. A wrist rest is necessary to dampen the side to side rocking of your wrists as you walk. For work where he's handwriting, he uses a standing desk (since it's not possible to handwrite while walking).
I previously noted the curious coffee shop culture in the US and was curious if Neal adhered to the cafe-author stereotype. He mentioned that he didn't - preferring an atmosphere of quiet and to stay in one place (I recall libraries being mentioned). If he needs to use a lot of his notes and materials, he needs to be at home with a desk to lay things out.
Schedules
Generally he doesn't like travelling to speaking arrangements since it can be quite disruptive to getting work done. Not only the actual time spent travelling and speaking but also the communication overhead that goes into organising an event.
He works in the morning normally - and stops as soon as he feels his alertness tailing off. Most of the time he writes a paragraph well enough the first time. As he said, 'editing a work of literature is like performing surgery on a human body. There are always scars and seams left over.'
Medium
All of his work eventually hits a computer - either in LaTeX or, lately, using Mac writing application Scrivener. Occasionally he'll handwrite work - work that is handwritten tends to be better thought through since there's a longer buffer between his thoughts and putting them to paper (since handwriting is slower).
On Notifications
I asked him how he felt about this world of push notifications - where we are pinged quickly with every new bit of information - tweet, news article or email. He says that he just has those turned off since his job doesn't require continuous notification. I would suggest that that's probably true of most jobs - we're just addicted to the small dopamine hit that accompanies each notification. Perhaps that will be the next life hack I try to implement.
Organisation
With such incredibly intricate story lines and characters, I was curious how he organises his research. Supposedly he doesn't have a definitive scheme, preferring to keep notes organised randomly. This is apparently useful to allow ideas and notes to cross-pollinate others as he searches for the notes he wants.
Backup
Finally, I was curious how he keeps his work from getting eaten by his computer. Supposedly he backs up to a RAID in the basement and to a USB stick every two weeks.
On a final note - it was a pleasure to meet the man himself. I took a hiatus from reading serious amounts of fiction for most of my late teens, as I became more immersed in my cycling hobby. As I left Cambridge, I started reading fiction again and started off with his novels. I've not stopped since.
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It's been just over 3 weeks since my last update and I've evidently failed to blog weekly as promised. It's hard to believe October is almost over. Fall (or Autumn) is definitely here now - leaves are falling and there are, on average, fewer hours of sunlight each day. The cold is sweeping in. As we started October the Berkeley 'Indian summer' carried over to give us a HOT first few days. This didn't persist much beyond the first weekend though and it quickly moved into 'hoody' weather.
Soon after that, I managed to accidentally smash my bedroom window while fitting my new amplifier and the nights became much cooler. This led to some very chilly nights, which became better when Ryan used his superior duct tape to actually seal the window with cardboard (versus just slotting it in - which was my approach).
Broken glass aside, it's been a monumentally busy month. The day after my last update, I went sea kayaking on the bay with Cal Adventures, the outdoor centre that is run by (affiliated with?) the university. This was a one day introductory course that allows me now to go out on the bay alone (within line of sight of the centre). While the pace of the course was a little slow for my liking, we were extremely lucky to catch such beautiful weather and being out on the bay was a peaceful experience that helped mitigate some of the stress of our second Advanced Robotics assignment.
The calm didn't last for long though because I was soon onto an assignment for Computer Vision. Once this was completed, I had an Advanced Robotics assignment that was due in a week. It had come out late beacuse our Professor had recently changed the questions and had been trying to solve them himself. This took longer than expected...perhaps an ominous sign. Logistics made it impossible to heed his advice that we start immediately and so I tried my best to do it in a week. This proved to be difficult - in the end taking 9 days (using all of my remaining late days).
During those 9 days, I put in about 50 hours of work, getting stuck on the last part of the first question for three days. Despite going to see our teaching assistant three times about it, I got no further. Bad strategy which resulted in me turning in the assignment 70% complete. Whoops. Looks like trying to juggle the job hunt with a graduate degree at Berkeley is a difficult optimisation problem!
This past week has been a bit of a rollercoaster for a number of reasons. After receiving one job offer, the other employers are reacting much more quickly and this next week I have 6 interviews planned. I'm wishing I hadn't scheduled my Google phone screen first - now that I've had numerous telephone screens, I might have screwed that one up much less badly.
A few weeks ago a professor sent around a request for volunteers to pick up/drop author Neal Stephenson from/to the airport. He came to a panel on campus, vaguely entitled 'On The Future: Beyond Computing'. Other members of the panel included Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and Jaron Lanier, author and coiner of the term 'virtual reality'. I capitalised on my free Zipcar credit and replied - a few hours after the email was sent around. It looks like my response time was favourable and I was tasked with dropping him off to Oakland airport on the day after the talk. Equally as exciting, Professor Katz invited me to dinner with the panelists afterwards. (Googling Professor Katz revealed him to be one of the creators of RAID. Incredible. I was very tempted to ask him if he knew where my data all went, that one time...)
This was an interesting experience, being both simultaneously over and underwhelming for reasons best explained in person. I'll post a separate note with my takeaways from my conversation with Neal Stephenson. Still, I was buzzing with excitement for a good two days after that. What struck me as most admirable was how normal these tremendously acclaimed people were. I'd always imagined that reaching their heights of 'notoriety' came with some ego inflation but meeting these three demonstrated how untrue that assumption was.
The next day we had the interview at the culmination of our application to Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad class. As I mentioned previously, this was one of the classes that helped me decide to come here and I was quite looking forward to it. The interview itself was short - which indicated that either we had enough information on our application or that they had already made up their mind. We'd put a lot of effort into our application, spending quite a bit of effort researching the space around our proposed 'startup' (similar to my capstone project). They asked questions around our idea and around our team for a total of 5 minutes before we were let free.
A double gin and tonic (or club soda, tonic is expensive here) plus 8.95 hours of sleep later, I woke up to a depressing rejection email from the teaching assistant for the class. We've yet to receive feedback as to our rejection which is strange, because they're normally very quick to queries. The silver lining is that I'll now have significantly more time next semester to sleep, exercise and submit applications for accelerators.
The last couple of days have been moderately alcoholic; after the last few weeks, I was desperate for some mindless social interaction. Yesterday we had our MEng Halloween party and it occurred to me that the primary reason people hold Halloween parties as adults here is to take photos. Despite buying $10 worth of cardboard sheets, some cyan spray paint and duct tape, I ran out of time and wasn't able to recreate a costume based on the Hype Dark robot. One day.
This coming 12 days is going to be the toughest of the semester yet. In addition to the 6 interviews, I have a couple of social engagements (including seeing LTJ Bukem and Bachelors of Science live!), two homework assignments and a midterm to prepare for. On the other hand, once this fortnight is over - life will become a lot easier.
Soon after that, I managed to accidentally smash my bedroom window while fitting my new amplifier and the nights became much cooler. This led to some very chilly nights, which became better when Ryan used his superior duct tape to actually seal the window with cardboard (versus just slotting it in - which was my approach).
Broken glass aside, it's been a monumentally busy month. The day after my last update, I went sea kayaking on the bay with Cal Adventures, the outdoor centre that is run by (affiliated with?) the university. This was a one day introductory course that allows me now to go out on the bay alone (within line of sight of the centre). While the pace of the course was a little slow for my liking, we were extremely lucky to catch such beautiful weather and being out on the bay was a peaceful experience that helped mitigate some of the stress of our second Advanced Robotics assignment.
The calm didn't last for long though because I was soon onto an assignment for Computer Vision. Once this was completed, I had an Advanced Robotics assignment that was due in a week. It had come out late beacuse our Professor had recently changed the questions and had been trying to solve them himself. This took longer than expected...perhaps an ominous sign. Logistics made it impossible to heed his advice that we start immediately and so I tried my best to do it in a week. This proved to be difficult - in the end taking 9 days (using all of my remaining late days).
During those 9 days, I put in about 50 hours of work, getting stuck on the last part of the first question for three days. Despite going to see our teaching assistant three times about it, I got no further. Bad strategy which resulted in me turning in the assignment 70% complete. Whoops. Looks like trying to juggle the job hunt with a graduate degree at Berkeley is a difficult optimisation problem!
This past week has been a bit of a rollercoaster for a number of reasons. After receiving one job offer, the other employers are reacting much more quickly and this next week I have 6 interviews planned. I'm wishing I hadn't scheduled my Google phone screen first - now that I've had numerous telephone screens, I might have screwed that one up much less badly.
A few weeks ago a professor sent around a request for volunteers to pick up/drop author Neal Stephenson from/to the airport. He came to a panel on campus, vaguely entitled 'On The Future: Beyond Computing'. Other members of the panel included Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and Jaron Lanier, author and coiner of the term 'virtual reality'. I capitalised on my free Zipcar credit and replied - a few hours after the email was sent around. It looks like my response time was favourable and I was tasked with dropping him off to Oakland airport on the day after the talk. Equally as exciting, Professor Katz invited me to dinner with the panelists afterwards. (Googling Professor Katz revealed him to be one of the creators of RAID. Incredible. I was very tempted to ask him if he knew where my data all went, that one time...)
This was an interesting experience, being both simultaneously over and underwhelming for reasons best explained in person. I'll post a separate note with my takeaways from my conversation with Neal Stephenson. Still, I was buzzing with excitement for a good two days after that. What struck me as most admirable was how normal these tremendously acclaimed people were. I'd always imagined that reaching their heights of 'notoriety' came with some ego inflation but meeting these three demonstrated how untrue that assumption was.
The next day we had the interview at the culmination of our application to Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad class. As I mentioned previously, this was one of the classes that helped me decide to come here and I was quite looking forward to it. The interview itself was short - which indicated that either we had enough information on our application or that they had already made up their mind. We'd put a lot of effort into our application, spending quite a bit of effort researching the space around our proposed 'startup' (similar to my capstone project). They asked questions around our idea and around our team for a total of 5 minutes before we were let free.
A double gin and tonic (or club soda, tonic is expensive here) plus 8.95 hours of sleep later, I woke up to a depressing rejection email from the teaching assistant for the class. We've yet to receive feedback as to our rejection which is strange, because they're normally very quick to queries. The silver lining is that I'll now have significantly more time next semester to sleep, exercise and submit applications for accelerators.
The last couple of days have been moderately alcoholic; after the last few weeks, I was desperate for some mindless social interaction. Yesterday we had our MEng Halloween party and it occurred to me that the primary reason people hold Halloween parties as adults here is to take photos. Despite buying $10 worth of cardboard sheets, some cyan spray paint and duct tape, I ran out of time and wasn't able to recreate a costume based on the Hype Dark robot. One day.
This coming 12 days is going to be the toughest of the semester yet. In addition to the 6 interviews, I have a couple of social engagements (including seeing LTJ Bukem and Bachelors of Science live!), two homework assignments and a midterm to prepare for. On the other hand, once this fortnight is over - life will become a lot easier.
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The tragedy of studying at Cal is that it's a stunningly beautiful place to study but there's scant time to explore! I've been getting slammed the past couple of weeks - having started the many interviews that are to come, and having struggled on a homework assignment. As soon as that was handed in, another was immediately available and I'm back to square one now with two on my plate.
One of the classes I'm taking, Advanced Robotics, is excellent and is exactly what I was looking for in my Master's degree. That said, I can't help feeling somewhat lost with each class. It's getting better as we've moved away from controls (which is ostensibly part of mechanical engineering, which explains why I had no idea what was happening for the first 6 weeks of class) and moved back towards classic AI. It also wasn't immediately clear to me, particularly without a background in controls, what exactly the relevance of the methods we learnt was. I'm now starting to get an appreciation of how you might be able to use them though, mainly through the homeworks.
In the last homework, we programmed a tetris game AI that uses an approximate linear program to generate a policy for how best to play tetris. We also applied linear quadratic regulators to help stabilise a inverted pendulum (a famous problem, also known as the cartpole problem) and to hover a helicopter. In the first case, we used a convex optimisation library called CVX to solve a linear problem. This approach seems particularly common in courses here at Berkeley.
I helped my teammate Gita out with one his homework assignments to find the shortest path in a graph. Instead of just asking students in his class (CE290i) to implement Dijkstra's, they managed to shoehorn the most horrific Java wrapper of a C linear program solving library into their assignment. Instead of writing a beautiful piece of code that could have solved the shortest path problem in maybe ~ 20 lines of Java code at a stretch, it was necessary to generate a string, pass it via some obfuscated interface to this solver and parse the output (of questionable precision). Yuck.
For the majority of my assignments I've been using MatLab, which presents a nice clear interface for implementing programmatic solutions to mathematical problems. It's not my favourite language though - I like writing clean code and it's easily possible to write unintelligible code in MatLab. Perhaps in the same way that you could in other weakly typed languages like Python or Javascript. MatLab also runs extremely slowly - being an interpreted language. Prof Abbeel mentioned that if you were actually implementing these solutions, you'd use C and see a speedup of ~ 1000 times.
In particular, one of the ideas that came to me during the many bleary eyed hours I spent staring at / trying to do the second homework was to use some of the control policy algorithms from robotics to control thyroid disease. As I've mentioned before - I suffer from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder which effectively means my thyroid gland functions less well over time. The typical approach advocated by mainstream physicians treats it pretty poorly. I feel normally energetic on about 1 in 7 days. The other 6 days of the week I'm sleepy for a good part of the day (hypothyroid). Often I'm unable to focus well (hyperthyroid). It's a difficult condition to live with as a normally productive person. Still, I manage.
Where a control algorithm could come in is by more closely modelling the relationship between the different thyroid 'variables'. The normal treatment assumes that a patient's TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) level is inversely proportional to their Free T4 (thyroxine) level. i.e., if your TSH is high, you need more synthetic thyroxine. If it is low, you need less. From my reading and shallow understanding of the endocrinological system, that's not an accurate assessment of the situation. There are perhaps five variables, if not more that need to be tracked. A patient's thyroid gland may not adequately convert T4 into T3 (this is the form of thyroxine that is usable by the body). Additionally, this conversion takes its toll on their adrenal system, requiring cortisol to carry out the conversion (I think). Taking supplemental T4 for a significant period of time can deplete these levels.
I'd be interested in trying to work out the actual relationship between these variables and perhaps implementing a control algorithm that could determine the optimal policy for medicating a patient. The only caveat is that collecting this data would be exorbitantly expensive (~ $200 for every data point) and that you'd need a lot of it. This is one of those projects that might have to wait for my one-day startup to go public. Incidentally, this autoimmune disorder is the same that Larry Page suffers from. I'm hoping that having a billionnaire with the same problem means some actual research will be done into it :).
This digression aside, these assignments are tough. I suspect they'd be easier if it hadn't been 4 years since I finished my undergraduate degree (and about 6 years since I last studied any maths). The Advanced Robotics course is tough too because I'm the only Master's student taking the course. I've tried to make friends with PhD students to study with but it's difficult - they have their own offices and are generally smarter than me! Luckily there is a sizeable group of Master's students to work on Computer Vision assignments with and that seems to be going well so far.
The other main activity of the last two weeks has been forming (by way of recruiting MBA students) a team for our application to the Lean Launchpad class at the Haas (business school) run by Steve Blank. This is one of the classes that helped me choose to attend Cal based on the advice of Kevin Yien and a handful of other students. This started with almost getting shot down by Steve Blank after my very first pitch at the information session (thankfully saved by an accurate but witty retort). It continued with a networking session and ended up with us forming a team with three MBA students, myself and my teammate Gita - also an engineering student.
Somehow this class wasn't widely advertised amongst CS graduate students and most MBA students wanted people who could build software for their teams. It was a little sad to take myself off the market of available team members. This class won't fulfil my core requirements next semester which means I'll be taking it in additional to my normal workload. I'm hopeful that there is some crossover between the work in the class and our capstone project. Still, next semester is going to be extremely busy.
I've made a conscious effort this week not to buy granola. That was my comfort food of choice and being high in both sugar and fat, it probably wasn't doing good things for my health in the quantity that I was consuming it. I've also succumbed to the coffee shop culture here and have been consuming caffeine regularly. Hopefully I'll get a chance to reset soon.
One of the classes I'm taking, Advanced Robotics, is excellent and is exactly what I was looking for in my Master's degree. That said, I can't help feeling somewhat lost with each class. It's getting better as we've moved away from controls (which is ostensibly part of mechanical engineering, which explains why I had no idea what was happening for the first 6 weeks of class) and moved back towards classic AI. It also wasn't immediately clear to me, particularly without a background in controls, what exactly the relevance of the methods we learnt was. I'm now starting to get an appreciation of how you might be able to use them though, mainly through the homeworks.
In the last homework, we programmed a tetris game AI that uses an approximate linear program to generate a policy for how best to play tetris. We also applied linear quadratic regulators to help stabilise a inverted pendulum (a famous problem, also known as the cartpole problem) and to hover a helicopter. In the first case, we used a convex optimisation library called CVX to solve a linear problem. This approach seems particularly common in courses here at Berkeley.
I helped my teammate Gita out with one his homework assignments to find the shortest path in a graph. Instead of just asking students in his class (CE290i) to implement Dijkstra's, they managed to shoehorn the most horrific Java wrapper of a C linear program solving library into their assignment. Instead of writing a beautiful piece of code that could have solved the shortest path problem in maybe ~ 20 lines of Java code at a stretch, it was necessary to generate a string, pass it via some obfuscated interface to this solver and parse the output (of questionable precision). Yuck.
For the majority of my assignments I've been using MatLab, which presents a nice clear interface for implementing programmatic solutions to mathematical problems. It's not my favourite language though - I like writing clean code and it's easily possible to write unintelligible code in MatLab. Perhaps in the same way that you could in other weakly typed languages like Python or Javascript. MatLab also runs extremely slowly - being an interpreted language. Prof Abbeel mentioned that if you were actually implementing these solutions, you'd use C and see a speedup of ~ 1000 times.
In particular, one of the ideas that came to me during the many bleary eyed hours I spent staring at / trying to do the second homework was to use some of the control policy algorithms from robotics to control thyroid disease. As I've mentioned before - I suffer from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder which effectively means my thyroid gland functions less well over time. The typical approach advocated by mainstream physicians treats it pretty poorly. I feel normally energetic on about 1 in 7 days. The other 6 days of the week I'm sleepy for a good part of the day (hypothyroid). Often I'm unable to focus well (hyperthyroid). It's a difficult condition to live with as a normally productive person. Still, I manage.
Where a control algorithm could come in is by more closely modelling the relationship between the different thyroid 'variables'. The normal treatment assumes that a patient's TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) level is inversely proportional to their Free T4 (thyroxine) level. i.e., if your TSH is high, you need more synthetic thyroxine. If it is low, you need less. From my reading and shallow understanding of the endocrinological system, that's not an accurate assessment of the situation. There are perhaps five variables, if not more that need to be tracked. A patient's thyroid gland may not adequately convert T4 into T3 (this is the form of thyroxine that is usable by the body). Additionally, this conversion takes its toll on their adrenal system, requiring cortisol to carry out the conversion (I think). Taking supplemental T4 for a significant period of time can deplete these levels.
I'd be interested in trying to work out the actual relationship between these variables and perhaps implementing a control algorithm that could determine the optimal policy for medicating a patient. The only caveat is that collecting this data would be exorbitantly expensive (~ $200 for every data point) and that you'd need a lot of it. This is one of those projects that might have to wait for my one-day startup to go public. Incidentally, this autoimmune disorder is the same that Larry Page suffers from. I'm hoping that having a billionnaire with the same problem means some actual research will be done into it :).
This digression aside, these assignments are tough. I suspect they'd be easier if it hadn't been 4 years since I finished my undergraduate degree (and about 6 years since I last studied any maths). The Advanced Robotics course is tough too because I'm the only Master's student taking the course. I've tried to make friends with PhD students to study with but it's difficult - they have their own offices and are generally smarter than me! Luckily there is a sizeable group of Master's students to work on Computer Vision assignments with and that seems to be going well so far.
The other main activity of the last two weeks has been forming (by way of recruiting MBA students) a team for our application to the Lean Launchpad class at the Haas (business school) run by Steve Blank. This is one of the classes that helped me choose to attend Cal based on the advice of Kevin Yien and a handful of other students. This started with almost getting shot down by Steve Blank after my very first pitch at the information session (thankfully saved by an accurate but witty retort). It continued with a networking session and ended up with us forming a team with three MBA students, myself and my teammate Gita - also an engineering student.
Somehow this class wasn't widely advertised amongst CS graduate students and most MBA students wanted people who could build software for their teams. It was a little sad to take myself off the market of available team members. This class won't fulfil my core requirements next semester which means I'll be taking it in additional to my normal workload. I'm hopeful that there is some crossover between the work in the class and our capstone project. Still, next semester is going to be extremely busy.
I've made a conscious effort this week not to buy granola. That was my comfort food of choice and being high in both sugar and fat, it probably wasn't doing good things for my health in the quantity that I was consuming it. I've also succumbed to the coffee shop culture here and have been consuming caffeine regularly. Hopefully I'll get a chance to reset soon.
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This week marked the beginning of the Fall recruitment cycle on campus where hundreds of employers will try their best to attract Cal students. That's actually a little incorrect - employers don't seem to have try very hard here, certainly not as hard as employers tried during my time at Cambridge. I'll go into more detail about that later.
As you can imagine, engineering jobs are very prevalent here - certainly disproportionately so, compared to most other types of jobs. In particular, software engineers were sought after by nearly every firm, which has made my job easier. This past week we had the university wide careers fair, which showcased a few hundred employers and was spread over three days. On Wednesday this coming week is the EECS (Electronic Engineering and Computer Science) career fair, which I'm very much looking forward to. In a few weeks time is the Startup Fair, which should be equally exciting.
We also had an Employers' Breakfast before the second day of the career fair this last week. This was interesting but it seems as if the employers hadn't been fully briefed on who was attending this breakfast. For instance, one recruiter was looking for software engineers graduating in December to begin work in January. She didn't realise that every single person in the room was on the MEng program which finishes in May. Whoops.
My attitude towards the job hunt here has been somewhat cavalier. I acknowledge that as a software engineer, it's not going to be difficult to get, at the very least, interviews at the firms I want to work at. (Whether I make it through each firm's gauntlet of interviews is another question entirely...) Having had five internships now and three years of experience, it's fair to say that I have an understanding of what kind of work I'd like to do and for what sort of company. A lot of the companies presenting at the fair were the usual big corporates which were not particularly exciting. A lot of the companies also refused to sponsor international students - which is an issue I've never encountered before back home (being a British citizen).
Using all four of these metrics, I was able to make my 'walk' of the fair more efficient. (I also looked up the list of employers online and filtered them down beforehand, so I knew exactly which stalls to go each day.) This seemed less arduous than what many undergrads and many of my less selective MEng colleagues were doing - visiting each stall in turn. Given the extensive queues at each stall, it looked like a painfully slow process. (Tip for future fairs: get there at the beginning. At 11am it was basically empty. At 12pm it was BUSY.)
I've been a little confused by how the process works here, having read that employers receive thousands of online applications and you're best served by putting your resume directly in front of them. Before I came to Berkeley, I made an extensive spreadsheet detailing the exact jobs at employers I'd want to work for but held off applying directly until I could meet the recruiters directly because of this advice. As it turns out, there's no right answer - it depends on how meticulous (or disorganised) the recuiter is.
The process here essentially works as follows (note that I omitted many of these steps):
1) Dress unlike you normally dress. Dress unlike you would normally dress at work. Wear your smartest suit. (Seriously?)
2) Bring a portfolio of resumes. Preferably customised for each employer but if you don't have time, it's fine to bring multiple copies of the same resume, as long as you customise the 'objective' statement on your resume. (I didn't have space for an 'objective' on my 1 page resume. I wrote individual cover letters for my shortlist of firms.)
3) Queue at your stall and prepare to overhead many conversations where students try to sell themselves to the recruiter. (Queueing, ugh.)
4) Introduce yourself to the recruiter. Hand them your resume.
5) Ask them specific questions about their job while they scan your resume. Try to sell yourself through these questions. (I think my questions were possibly a little too efficient.)
6) Try not to appear unnerved while they make marks on your resume. (As long as it's not a big X you're hopefully OK.)
7) Go home and submit another resume online. Turns out the one you gave them was just for them to later more easily retrieve your online application. (Apologies to the trees out there.)
This whole process seems so completely over the top to me, especially coming from a university like Cambridge where the balance of power between employers and students was the other way. Firstly, wearing a suit to a careers fair? If any employer is so crass as to judge candidates by their appearance even BEFORE their interview, then I'd have serious questions about their work culture! As for queueing up to be pre-screened at the careers fair, it all seems rather backwards to me. The reason we have online applications is that it's all the more efficient. To fall back to paper because of the volume of applicants is just crazy but seemingly necessary.
The only justification I can come up with is that Cal is a BIG university with a lot of students. Getting any sort of job here is a tougher process than back at Cambridge. There are applicants from all over the US from many other equivalently good universities and employers can be as selective as they like. In England, Oxford and Cambridge are, for some reason, in a league of their own above other universities. There are also just 70-90 computer science undergraduates coming out of Cambridge each year. It's easy to see why they're so much more in demand. Here on the other hand, several thousand undergraduates roll out of Cal and other similarly prestigious universities every year. Every competitive advantage helps.
As you can imagine, engineering jobs are very prevalent here - certainly disproportionately so, compared to most other types of jobs. In particular, software engineers were sought after by nearly every firm, which has made my job easier. This past week we had the university wide careers fair, which showcased a few hundred employers and was spread over three days. On Wednesday this coming week is the EECS (Electronic Engineering and Computer Science) career fair, which I'm very much looking forward to. In a few weeks time is the Startup Fair, which should be equally exciting.
We also had an Employers' Breakfast before the second day of the career fair this last week. This was interesting but it seems as if the employers hadn't been fully briefed on who was attending this breakfast. For instance, one recruiter was looking for software engineers graduating in December to begin work in January. She didn't realise that every single person in the room was on the MEng program which finishes in May. Whoops.
My attitude towards the job hunt here has been somewhat cavalier. I acknowledge that as a software engineer, it's not going to be difficult to get, at the very least, interviews at the firms I want to work at. (Whether I make it through each firm's gauntlet of interviews is another question entirely...) Having had five internships now and three years of experience, it's fair to say that I have an understanding of what kind of work I'd like to do and for what sort of company. A lot of the companies presenting at the fair were the usual big corporates which were not particularly exciting. A lot of the companies also refused to sponsor international students - which is an issue I've never encountered before back home (being a British citizen).
Using all four of these metrics, I was able to make my 'walk' of the fair more efficient. (I also looked up the list of employers online and filtered them down beforehand, so I knew exactly which stalls to go each day.) This seemed less arduous than what many undergrads and many of my less selective MEng colleagues were doing - visiting each stall in turn. Given the extensive queues at each stall, it looked like a painfully slow process. (Tip for future fairs: get there at the beginning. At 11am it was basically empty. At 12pm it was BUSY.)
I've been a little confused by how the process works here, having read that employers receive thousands of online applications and you're best served by putting your resume directly in front of them. Before I came to Berkeley, I made an extensive spreadsheet detailing the exact jobs at employers I'd want to work for but held off applying directly until I could meet the recruiters directly because of this advice. As it turns out, there's no right answer - it depends on how meticulous (or disorganised) the recuiter is.
The process here essentially works as follows (note that I omitted many of these steps):
1) Dress unlike you normally dress. Dress unlike you would normally dress at work. Wear your smartest suit. (Seriously?)
2) Bring a portfolio of resumes. Preferably customised for each employer but if you don't have time, it's fine to bring multiple copies of the same resume, as long as you customise the 'objective' statement on your resume. (I didn't have space for an 'objective' on my 1 page resume. I wrote individual cover letters for my shortlist of firms.)
3) Queue at your stall and prepare to overhead many conversations where students try to sell themselves to the recruiter. (Queueing, ugh.)
4) Introduce yourself to the recruiter. Hand them your resume.
5) Ask them specific questions about their job while they scan your resume. Try to sell yourself through these questions. (I think my questions were possibly a little too efficient.)
6) Try not to appear unnerved while they make marks on your resume. (As long as it's not a big X you're hopefully OK.)
7) Go home and submit another resume online. Turns out the one you gave them was just for them to later more easily retrieve your online application. (Apologies to the trees out there.)
This whole process seems so completely over the top to me, especially coming from a university like Cambridge where the balance of power between employers and students was the other way. Firstly, wearing a suit to a careers fair? If any employer is so crass as to judge candidates by their appearance even BEFORE their interview, then I'd have serious questions about their work culture! As for queueing up to be pre-screened at the careers fair, it all seems rather backwards to me. The reason we have online applications is that it's all the more efficient. To fall back to paper because of the volume of applicants is just crazy but seemingly necessary.
The only justification I can come up with is that Cal is a BIG university with a lot of students. Getting any sort of job here is a tougher process than back at Cambridge. There are applicants from all over the US from many other equivalently good universities and employers can be as selective as they like. In England, Oxford and Cambridge are, for some reason, in a league of their own above other universities. There are also just 70-90 computer science undergraduates coming out of Cambridge each year. It's easy to see why they're so much more in demand. Here on the other hand, several thousand undergraduates roll out of Cal and other similarly prestigious universities every year. Every competitive advantage helps.
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