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
Searched for
- Posts tagged 'berkeley'
No comments yet
No comments yet!
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.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
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.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
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.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
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.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
The two weeks of 'bootcamp' really flew by, perhaps quicker than expected. Whilst our scheduled classes only occupied half of each day, other activities and assignments took up much of the free time we had. We've had several 'business' classes, taught by lecturers either from the Haas business school or poached from other business schools. These have been very different to the traditional lecture format I'm used to but, perhaps because of this, all the more engaging. These typically involve case discussions, as an MBA program might, where we discuss the background and issues surrounding a business decision and eventually try to reason out (as a class) what the correct choice is. We've also had a fair amount of marketing work which was interesting but disproportionately time consuming.
One of the interesting events was a mixer with the other new 'professional program' graduate students, namely the MBA, LLM (Master of Law), JD (Doctorate of Law) and MPP (Master of Public Policy) students. These students were, as every class, varied - some interesting, some less so. One of the most colourful characters was a Brazilian student who was former a mergers and acqusitions banker at an investment bank in Brazil. Our conversation reminded me a lot of my interview with an MD at BarCap called Omar Selim - who was possibly the most unpleasant person I have ever met in my career. I have a naturally rounded posture from spending many hours of my life on a bicycle and the rest of my life in front of a computer screen. It's not a slouch so much as the way my back muscles naturally develop. Still, the Brazilian student decided to take it upon himself to teach me how to speak to people in person, including: standing up straight, squaring off my shoulders so that I was parallel to his frame and looking at the other person in the eyes. All this for the purpose of appearing engaged in our conversation. What he failed to understand was the reason I was actively looking for a way to escape from our conversation and were he a genuinely interesting and pleasant person, I would have naturally looked engaged in our conversation!
Another highlight included a team bridge and campanile (tower) building competition where we were fortunate to have a civil engineering student on our team. (Side story: he was from Botswana - how awesome.) Our popsicle (or lollypop) bridge did really well, hitting the max load their 'load testing' machine (a bicycle pump with a plate attached) was able to provide.
That weekend during the bootcamp, I hitched a ride with my cousin Sawan as he drove back from UC Davis to his home in Saratoga. Sawan's dad (my father's cousin) has lived in Silicon Valley for decades and his stories of the area are fascinating. It was Sawan's sister's (Risha's) birthday that evening and we went straight to an upmarket restaurant and shopping area called Santana Row where we spent about 45 minutes circling the various parking lots looking for parking. I found this rather entertaining - all the rich technologists with their luxury German cars must find it less so. Eventually we parked at a cinema complex across the street and ate at a restaurant called Maggiano's where, as a permanent promotion, they give each diner the exact same main course again for free to take home at the end of your meal. Strange, right?
On Saturday I met up with Anish, my long term travel buddy who moved out to Silicon Valley in January. After a scenic hike up the Panoramic Hill, we visited the ISKON Hare Krishna temple in Berkeley to attend their Saturday aarti. I've never been to a Hare Krishna aarti before but the combination of music and chanting was quite relaxing. I can understand why people enjoy it. We later had dinner in the infamous 'Gourmet Ghetto' district in Berkeley at an eccentric vegan cafe called Cafe Gratitude. This place apparently shut down over summer because it previously operated a not-for-profit business model where visitors could pay what they like. Presumably people liked to pay less than the food cost.
All the dishes at the cafe had names beginning with 'I am', followed by a adjective. The waitress' reply after you ordered would be 'you are'. It was interesting. After we ordered, she asked if we'd like to hear the question of the day. This was an open question to think about while we ate - and she didn't ask for an answer. The question that day was, 'What do you have faith in?'. We found that quite amusing, having just come from the temple.
The next day I went for a ride in the hills with Alberto - a Spanish student on the same program as me - who was impressively quick on a $120 Walmart bike. Being a Sunday morning, we encountered many local riders. Most of these were surprisingly slow, despite having all the kit.
On Monday I joined a group of new international students to go find dinner in Berkeley. We went to a restaurant called Sliver - a quirky pizzeria that is apparently a clone of the original 'one-flavour' pizza restaurant, a place called Cheeseboard which is a little further from campus. Both places serve just one flavour of (vegetarian) pizza each day and you can order it by the slice. Sadly it was more expensive than all the pizza we ate in Italian but thankfully, just as tasty. One of the freshman (first year undergraduate) students in the group amused me greatly when, after learning I did my undergraduate at Cambridge, he commented that I'd 'really picked up a British accent'!
Gita, one of my project teammates, and I were also able to drive down to the 3D Robotics Berkeley office to meet Brandon, our industrial sponsor. Their office was an exciting place with quadcopters and aircraft hung off most walls and 3D printers taking a central position. One of the highlights for me was meeting Chris Anderson, the founder of 3D Robotics and the former editor of Wired - who is one of my tech idols and favourite authors.
Other than numerous meetings for my capstone project, the rest of the week was filled with preparing for our marketing presentation. While it wasn't as slick as some of our peers, ours was humourous. We had to run market tests for our product, an energy drink which claimed to be easy on the gut. We tested this claim specifically. I found that it was easy on my gut but sadly my teammate did not have the same experience. (Incidentally, that same teammate happens to be one of the worlds' quickest Rubiks cube solvers. Berkeley is pretty awesome, eh?)
At the end of the week, I had been expecting a delivery from Amazon, which never arrived. After calling UPS to check on the package, it looks like they had made an error when transcribing the address and instead of delivering my package to me, they had misread the D as an 0 and had delivered it several hundred houses further up the street. We live on a hill, so that was about 2 miles uphill. The package that I was expecting contained a large kitchen trashcan and I made it clear to Amazon that it wasn't feasible to go collect it, especially not without a car. They promptly sent another and apologised for the inconvenience.
That weekend, I set about realising my dream of having a monitor at eye-level, which I accomplished at Last.fm using an Ikea hack. Whilst I had previously vowed never to return to Ikea, the promise of having enough spare space to host actual speakers was tempting enough. I had planned to pick up the shelf and take the bus back (with my bicycle) but, predictably, I spent longer in the store than was healthy. There were many different shelf options and, not having a tape measure, I had no idea how large my desk was. This was resolved by taking several sized shelves down to the 'desk' showroom and physically comparing them - a test flawed by the fact that my desk is no longer sold by Ikea. Eventually, I settled on a shelf that was about the right size and queued behind all the undergraduates who had just moved in for the semester and were buying furniture.
Having wasted more time than I had imagined - I just missed the hourly bus that runs from San Francisco to the UC Berkeley campus. Initially, I misread the bus times on the 'Transit' app and thought it'd be just 12 minutes but soon realised this was the bus to San Francisco. Oops. The other bus was about 40 minutes away at this point and I was convinced I could walk to its next stop in less time than that and thus avoid waiting around at the crowded bus stop. This didn't really happen though because I walked in the wrong direction. Eventually I loosed my backpack strap, slid the shelf in under my armpit and put the other end to rest on my handlebars. After an awkward and wobbly push off, I was away - cycling with a 6 kilogram shelf and steering with my right arm. The intersections proved to be slightly tricky but I made it through without any major incident. Eventually I made it to the road up to our apartment where I actually managed to catch up with two girls wearing Cal triathlete gear. They were not amused when I said hello to them.
My shelf built, I succumbed to Amazon's will and ordered the Andrew Philips speakers I had been lusting after. Somehow, in the couple of weeks since I first searched for them, their price had been gradually lowering itself. When it got to $75, I had to admit defeat and haven't regretted placing the order since! Just before the speakers arrived however, two large packages arrived. It turns out that the original trashcan we had ordered had made it down correctly. So had the replacement trashcan that Amazon sent. We'd gone from having no trashcans to having two! Amazon requested that I send back the second trashcan but being carless, I asked if they could pick it up. They said it wouldn't be economical to do so and that I may as well just keep it. Winning. This is Anish's birthday present for next year sorted.
The next day my flatmates and I got some nice bonding time when we ran numerous errands and went to brunch (really just lunch IMO) at a Thai temple in Berkeley. This is a very Berkeley establishment - a temple that hosts brunch on Sundays in order to raise funds. The food was tasty, authentic and the atmosphere jovial. I particularly liked the coconut pancakes that were dessert. Nom.
One of the interesting events was a mixer with the other new 'professional program' graduate students, namely the MBA, LLM (Master of Law), JD (Doctorate of Law) and MPP (Master of Public Policy) students. These students were, as every class, varied - some interesting, some less so. One of the most colourful characters was a Brazilian student who was former a mergers and acqusitions banker at an investment bank in Brazil. Our conversation reminded me a lot of my interview with an MD at BarCap called Omar Selim - who was possibly the most unpleasant person I have ever met in my career. I have a naturally rounded posture from spending many hours of my life on a bicycle and the rest of my life in front of a computer screen. It's not a slouch so much as the way my back muscles naturally develop. Still, the Brazilian student decided to take it upon himself to teach me how to speak to people in person, including: standing up straight, squaring off my shoulders so that I was parallel to his frame and looking at the other person in the eyes. All this for the purpose of appearing engaged in our conversation. What he failed to understand was the reason I was actively looking for a way to escape from our conversation and were he a genuinely interesting and pleasant person, I would have naturally looked engaged in our conversation!
Another highlight included a team bridge and campanile (tower) building competition where we were fortunate to have a civil engineering student on our team. (Side story: he was from Botswana - how awesome.) Our popsicle (or lollypop) bridge did really well, hitting the max load their 'load testing' machine (a bicycle pump with a plate attached) was able to provide.
That weekend during the bootcamp, I hitched a ride with my cousin Sawan as he drove back from UC Davis to his home in Saratoga. Sawan's dad (my father's cousin) has lived in Silicon Valley for decades and his stories of the area are fascinating. It was Sawan's sister's (Risha's) birthday that evening and we went straight to an upmarket restaurant and shopping area called Santana Row where we spent about 45 minutes circling the various parking lots looking for parking. I found this rather entertaining - all the rich technologists with their luxury German cars must find it less so. Eventually we parked at a cinema complex across the street and ate at a restaurant called Maggiano's where, as a permanent promotion, they give each diner the exact same main course again for free to take home at the end of your meal. Strange, right?
On Saturday I met up with Anish, my long term travel buddy who moved out to Silicon Valley in January. After a scenic hike up the Panoramic Hill, we visited the ISKON Hare Krishna temple in Berkeley to attend their Saturday aarti. I've never been to a Hare Krishna aarti before but the combination of music and chanting was quite relaxing. I can understand why people enjoy it. We later had dinner in the infamous 'Gourmet Ghetto' district in Berkeley at an eccentric vegan cafe called Cafe Gratitude. This place apparently shut down over summer because it previously operated a not-for-profit business model where visitors could pay what they like. Presumably people liked to pay less than the food cost.
All the dishes at the cafe had names beginning with 'I am', followed by a adjective. The waitress' reply after you ordered would be 'you are
The next day I went for a ride in the hills with Alberto - a Spanish student on the same program as me - who was impressively quick on a $120 Walmart bike. Being a Sunday morning, we encountered many local riders. Most of these were surprisingly slow, despite having all the kit.
On Monday I joined a group of new international students to go find dinner in Berkeley. We went to a restaurant called Sliver - a quirky pizzeria that is apparently a clone of the original 'one-flavour' pizza restaurant, a place called Cheeseboard which is a little further from campus. Both places serve just one flavour of (vegetarian) pizza each day and you can order it by the slice. Sadly it was more expensive than all the pizza we ate in Italian but thankfully, just as tasty. One of the freshman (first year undergraduate) students in the group amused me greatly when, after learning I did my undergraduate at Cambridge, he commented that I'd 'really picked up a British accent'!
Gita, one of my project teammates, and I were also able to drive down to the 3D Robotics Berkeley office to meet Brandon, our industrial sponsor. Their office was an exciting place with quadcopters and aircraft hung off most walls and 3D printers taking a central position. One of the highlights for me was meeting Chris Anderson, the founder of 3D Robotics and the former editor of Wired - who is one of my tech idols and favourite authors.
Other than numerous meetings for my capstone project, the rest of the week was filled with preparing for our marketing presentation. While it wasn't as slick as some of our peers, ours was humourous. We had to run market tests for our product, an energy drink which claimed to be easy on the gut. We tested this claim specifically. I found that it was easy on my gut but sadly my teammate did not have the same experience. (Incidentally, that same teammate happens to be one of the worlds' quickest Rubiks cube solvers. Berkeley is pretty awesome, eh?)
At the end of the week, I had been expecting a delivery from Amazon, which never arrived. After calling UPS to check on the package, it looks like they had made an error when transcribing the address and instead of delivering my package to me, they had misread the D as an 0 and had delivered it several hundred houses further up the street. We live on a hill, so that was about 2 miles uphill. The package that I was expecting contained a large kitchen trashcan and I made it clear to Amazon that it wasn't feasible to go collect it, especially not without a car. They promptly sent another and apologised for the inconvenience.
That weekend, I set about realising my dream of having a monitor at eye-level, which I accomplished at Last.fm using an Ikea hack. Whilst I had previously vowed never to return to Ikea, the promise of having enough spare space to host actual speakers was tempting enough. I had planned to pick up the shelf and take the bus back (with my bicycle) but, predictably, I spent longer in the store than was healthy. There were many different shelf options and, not having a tape measure, I had no idea how large my desk was. This was resolved by taking several sized shelves down to the 'desk' showroom and physically comparing them - a test flawed by the fact that my desk is no longer sold by Ikea. Eventually, I settled on a shelf that was about the right size and queued behind all the undergraduates who had just moved in for the semester and were buying furniture.
Having wasted more time than I had imagined - I just missed the hourly bus that runs from San Francisco to the UC Berkeley campus. Initially, I misread the bus times on the 'Transit' app and thought it'd be just 12 minutes but soon realised this was the bus to San Francisco. Oops. The other bus was about 40 minutes away at this point and I was convinced I could walk to its next stop in less time than that and thus avoid waiting around at the crowded bus stop. This didn't really happen though because I walked in the wrong direction. Eventually I loosed my backpack strap, slid the shelf in under my armpit and put the other end to rest on my handlebars. After an awkward and wobbly push off, I was away - cycling with a 6 kilogram shelf and steering with my right arm. The intersections proved to be slightly tricky but I made it through without any major incident. Eventually I made it to the road up to our apartment where I actually managed to catch up with two girls wearing Cal triathlete gear. They were not amused when I said hello to them.
My shelf built, I succumbed to Amazon's will and ordered the Andrew Philips speakers I had been lusting after. Somehow, in the couple of weeks since I first searched for them, their price had been gradually lowering itself. When it got to $75, I had to admit defeat and haven't regretted placing the order since! Just before the speakers arrived however, two large packages arrived. It turns out that the original trashcan we had ordered had made it down correctly. So had the replacement trashcan that Amazon sent. We'd gone from having no trashcans to having two! Amazon requested that I send back the second trashcan but being carless, I asked if they could pick it up. They said it wouldn't be economical to do so and that I may as well just keep it. Winning. This is Anish's birthday present for next year sorted.
The next day my flatmates and I got some nice bonding time when we ran numerous errands and went to brunch (really just lunch IMO) at a Thai temple in Berkeley. This is a very Berkeley establishment - a temple that hosts brunch on Sundays in order to raise funds. The food was tasty, authentic and the atmosphere jovial. I particularly liked the coconut pancakes that were dessert. Nom.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
Time in California is short. Yes, a day here is the same as a day in Europe. It's just that more seems to happen in a day here than in a day back in London. I put that down to the volume of 'things' that happen here.
There's a recurring entry in my 'Weekend' Wunderlist list that says 'Blog Post'. It's been taunting me for the last few weeks as the due date of 'Sun 18 Aug' turned from black to red and stayed that way, glaring angrily at me everytime I practiced David Allen's GTD weekly list review.
I'll go back in time to the two weeks of bootcamp in the next post but for now I'm going to concentrate on the time after that.
Semester started on Thursday the 29th of August. I had previously thought this was just an artefact of the strange way Cambridge schedules its terms but it seems that this habit was carried over the Atlantic too. The beginning of that week was ostensibly empty for returning grad students but spent in hours of orientation for us newly enrolled students.
EECS orientation was moderately interesting, although clearly geared more towards the research focussed PhD and Master's students. Still, some interesting facts were revealed - including that the EECS MEng students (i.e. people like me) in years past often used to spend most of their weekends working (unlike other engineering disciplines). I was also able to find out more detailed selectivity numbers - while our program was less selective than the MS/PhD program (which has an acceptance rate of 6%), it still had a respectable 15% acceptance rate, and about a 5% enrolment rate (i.e. 20 enrolled out of 420 applicants).
EECS is a big discipline here at Berkeley, no doubt due to Cal's heritage in the area. Notable alumni include Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) and Eric Schmidt. The introductory computer science class supposedly has 1100 undergraduates enrolled in it this year. Astonishing. We also have a lounge lovingly named 'The Woz' and a sponsored 'Vodafone' lab.
After orientation, Gita, Yong and I set to work putting the finishing touches on two drones - an EasyStar foam fixed wing aircraft and a 3D Robotics hexacopter. After spending a day getting them up and running, we took them down to the Berkeley Marina on Wednesday evening. I quickly managed to crash the EasyStar resulting in a clean shear in the foam body that went over the wing. Under Yong's control, the Hex had one clean, slightly wobbly flight and made it down again. The second flight however caused it to lose control - and it quickly was picked up by the wind. Despite cutting the throttle, it refused to return to the ground and the wind took it off into the distance over a small hill. After it passed over the hill, it dropped out of the sky and we ran over to where it came down.
Sadly, just beyond the hill was an inland body of water that was an extension of the Bay itself. The drone had actually made it 10 feet over the water before the power cut. By the time we arrived, little was visible of the drone except for bubbles that were escaping to the surface. We thought this was the batteries exploding but it later turns out this was the capacitors on the six ESCs blowing. I found this rather amusing but the gravitas of the situation was clear - we'd just sunk a $1200 drone. I later realised that the autopilot driving the drone was mine, so I was (at least, partially) invested in its death.
Gita, being the absolute hero that he is, later went back at low tide (1 am) with a wet suit and combed the floor of the Bay looking for the drone. Sure enough, he found it. Yong and I woke up in the morning and were concerned that we hadn't heard from Gita - but he eventually resurfaced (online, I mean) and we acquired a new sense of respect for him!
Classes started on Thursday afternoon and were generally extremely crowded. There is no penalty at Berkeley for signing up to multiple classes for the first two weeks. This allows people to sample various classes before deciding what they'd actually like to take for credit. I was part of this group - being undecided between which two of Computer Vision, Introduction to Robotics and Advanced Robotics I'd like to take. In the end I settled on Computer Vision and Advanced Robotics - both of which are fascinating courses and the latter of which is likely to result in an early mathematics-induced retirement to my cremation chamber.
American classes generally tend to have 3 hours a week of lectures - spread over two sessions. In addition, instructors (usually professors and their teaching assistants) hold 'office hours' where you can go and ask them questions about their course content. Finally, each class has homework - considerable exercises or problem sets which typically take two full days of work to finish.
I'm coming to the end of my first batch of homeworks - and they are time consuming and exhausting. Given my generally poor and now rusty knowledge of maths, I'm struggling to remember facts that were once at the front of my mind seven years ago! This has been a stressful experience that I hope will get easier. Additionally, the office hours frustrate me, generally because you have to contend with many other students for the instructor's time. This can be painful, especially when they're asking questions about a part of the homework that you have yet to get to.
On the other hand, the homework for the 'engineering leadership' class I'm taking (which is a mandatory part of my MEng program) has been surprisingly easy. I guess I've always been a glutton for reading and writing though and most of it has been reading and writing based. It is my escape from maths.
The homework situation was compounded by our decision to visit the UAS West conference in San Diego - a industry focussed UAS (unmanned aerial systems) conference to which we gained free admittance. We left Berkeley at about 6pm on Thursday evening, reaching San Diego at sometime after 2am - on the whole a rapid drive down. After sleeping for a few hours at the waterfront flat of an acquaintance's friends in La Jolla (hot tip: it's not pronounced how it sounds, at all), we woke up to attend a morning of talks. The talks were mainly centred around the military and military uses of UAS technology - which were interesting but perhaps not directly relevant to our project to bring drone technology to the civilian market.
That afternoon, we visited the 3D Robotics head office, which was the drone hacker's equivalent of visiting Santa's Workshop. There were large screens, soldering stations and quadcopters everywhere. We chatted to our contacts there for a bit and started the long drive back to Berkeley - trying our best to avoid the Los Angeles rush hour.
Sadly, in a misguided attempt to beat the rush hour traffic, we ended up a long way off track. After we recovered back onto the I5 interstate, we ended up back off track when we sleepily took a wrong turn. These detours added a good two hours to our trip - arriving back to Berkeley at 2:30am, a full 11.5 hours later. On the plus side, we stopped at an excellent sushi restaurant in Bakersfield called Sushiko. Paraphrasing Gita, 'it's surprising to find good sushi in Bakersfield, out of all places'.
Despite all the driving, we made it back to Berkeley with a full Saturday to spare. The fatigue had hit us both though and it took the weekend to recover. The homework wasn't waiting though and I spent the rest of the weekend (and most of the week) diving headfirst into the wonderful world of MatLab.
There's a recurring entry in my 'Weekend' Wunderlist list that says 'Blog Post'. It's been taunting me for the last few weeks as the due date of 'Sun 18 Aug' turned from black to red and stayed that way, glaring angrily at me everytime I practiced David Allen's GTD weekly list review.
I'll go back in time to the two weeks of bootcamp in the next post but for now I'm going to concentrate on the time after that.
Semester started on Thursday the 29th of August. I had previously thought this was just an artefact of the strange way Cambridge schedules its terms but it seems that this habit was carried over the Atlantic too. The beginning of that week was ostensibly empty for returning grad students but spent in hours of orientation for us newly enrolled students.
EECS orientation was moderately interesting, although clearly geared more towards the research focussed PhD and Master's students. Still, some interesting facts were revealed - including that the EECS MEng students (i.e. people like me) in years past often used to spend most of their weekends working (unlike other engineering disciplines). I was also able to find out more detailed selectivity numbers - while our program was less selective than the MS/PhD program (which has an acceptance rate of 6%), it still had a respectable 15% acceptance rate, and about a 5% enrolment rate (i.e. 20 enrolled out of 420 applicants).
EECS is a big discipline here at Berkeley, no doubt due to Cal's heritage in the area. Notable alumni include Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) and Eric Schmidt. The introductory computer science class supposedly has 1100 undergraduates enrolled in it this year. Astonishing. We also have a lounge lovingly named 'The Woz' and a sponsored 'Vodafone' lab.
After orientation, Gita, Yong and I set to work putting the finishing touches on two drones - an EasyStar foam fixed wing aircraft and a 3D Robotics hexacopter. After spending a day getting them up and running, we took them down to the Berkeley Marina on Wednesday evening. I quickly managed to crash the EasyStar resulting in a clean shear in the foam body that went over the wing. Under Yong's control, the Hex had one clean, slightly wobbly flight and made it down again. The second flight however caused it to lose control - and it quickly was picked up by the wind. Despite cutting the throttle, it refused to return to the ground and the wind took it off into the distance over a small hill. After it passed over the hill, it dropped out of the sky and we ran over to where it came down.
Sadly, just beyond the hill was an inland body of water that was an extension of the Bay itself. The drone had actually made it 10 feet over the water before the power cut. By the time we arrived, little was visible of the drone except for bubbles that were escaping to the surface. We thought this was the batteries exploding but it later turns out this was the capacitors on the six ESCs blowing. I found this rather amusing but the gravitas of the situation was clear - we'd just sunk a $1200 drone. I later realised that the autopilot driving the drone was mine, so I was (at least, partially) invested in its death.
Gita, being the absolute hero that he is, later went back at low tide (1 am) with a wet suit and combed the floor of the Bay looking for the drone. Sure enough, he found it. Yong and I woke up in the morning and were concerned that we hadn't heard from Gita - but he eventually resurfaced (online, I mean) and we acquired a new sense of respect for him!
Classes started on Thursday afternoon and were generally extremely crowded. There is no penalty at Berkeley for signing up to multiple classes for the first two weeks. This allows people to sample various classes before deciding what they'd actually like to take for credit. I was part of this group - being undecided between which two of Computer Vision, Introduction to Robotics and Advanced Robotics I'd like to take. In the end I settled on Computer Vision and Advanced Robotics - both of which are fascinating courses and the latter of which is likely to result in an early mathematics-induced retirement to my cremation chamber.
American classes generally tend to have 3 hours a week of lectures - spread over two sessions. In addition, instructors (usually professors and their teaching assistants) hold 'office hours' where you can go and ask them questions about their course content. Finally, each class has homework - considerable exercises or problem sets which typically take two full days of work to finish.
I'm coming to the end of my first batch of homeworks - and they are time consuming and exhausting. Given my generally poor and now rusty knowledge of maths, I'm struggling to remember facts that were once at the front of my mind seven years ago! This has been a stressful experience that I hope will get easier. Additionally, the office hours frustrate me, generally because you have to contend with many other students for the instructor's time. This can be painful, especially when they're asking questions about a part of the homework that you have yet to get to.
On the other hand, the homework for the 'engineering leadership' class I'm taking (which is a mandatory part of my MEng program) has been surprisingly easy. I guess I've always been a glutton for reading and writing though and most of it has been reading and writing based. It is my escape from maths.
The homework situation was compounded by our decision to visit the UAS West conference in San Diego - a industry focussed UAS (unmanned aerial systems) conference to which we gained free admittance. We left Berkeley at about 6pm on Thursday evening, reaching San Diego at sometime after 2am - on the whole a rapid drive down. After sleeping for a few hours at the waterfront flat of an acquaintance's friends in La Jolla (hot tip: it's not pronounced how it sounds, at all), we woke up to attend a morning of talks. The talks were mainly centred around the military and military uses of UAS technology - which were interesting but perhaps not directly relevant to our project to bring drone technology to the civilian market.
That afternoon, we visited the 3D Robotics head office, which was the drone hacker's equivalent of visiting Santa's Workshop. There were large screens, soldering stations and quadcopters everywhere. We chatted to our contacts there for a bit and started the long drive back to Berkeley - trying our best to avoid the Los Angeles rush hour.
Sadly, in a misguided attempt to beat the rush hour traffic, we ended up a long way off track. After we recovered back onto the I5 interstate, we ended up back off track when we sleepily took a wrong turn. These detours added a good two hours to our trip - arriving back to Berkeley at 2:30am, a full 11.5 hours later. On the plus side, we stopped at an excellent sushi restaurant in Bakersfield called Sushiko. Paraphrasing Gita, 'it's surprising to find good sushi in Bakersfield, out of all places'.
Despite all the driving, we made it back to Berkeley with a full Saturday to spare. The fatigue had hit us both though and it took the weekend to recover. The homework wasn't waiting though and I spent the rest of the weekend (and most of the week) diving headfirst into the wonderful world of MatLab.
1 comment posted so far
sung wrote at 8:29 pm on Mon 16th Sep -
loving the blogs mate, keep updating us!
The next few days I had a moderate amount of unpacking to do, but lacking a laptop (I ordered a custom specification MacBook Air to the Berkeley Apple Store, not wanting to spent top dollar for the most expensive model but wanting something with more memory and a faster processor than the models they stock in store), I had a fair amount of free time.
On Thursday I met up with some of my classmates from India who I had spoken with previously online. We had lunch at Subway - which I suppose I had to experience once, but will try not to visit again (not when there are so many independent awesome little restaurants and cafes around campus). Around campus are basically all of the foods I love to eat back home with my friends - including many Asian (Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants), several bubble tea cafes that all serve matcha and a Chinese bakery!
Studying here also seems to be primarily done either on the grass on campus (where I am sitting now) or in coffee shops with a laptop out and headphones in. This is very different to my undergraduate experience at Cambridge - although they had recently opened a coffee shop in college when I left. Perhaps this is due to the lack of electric kettles in most American households, students need to get their caffeine fix externally.
In general, the Berkeley campus, although being a well ranked university, in the top five globally and the best public university in the world, appears to lack much of the pretentiousness that Cambridge has. While I enjoyed dressing up in a suit and acting like high society at Fitz, I do admire the casual but super intelligent attitude that students here have. While buildings here aren't nearly as old as at Cambridge, they are remarkably impressive. The campus isn't huge but is quite dense - with notable buildings around every corner. (Most of these buildings seem to house coffee shops too. There are also two very large libraries that are connected by an underground tunnel. I've not found a reason to use these yet though.)
It's busy at the moment but I'm told it will get considerably busier in a couple of weeks as all the undergraduates return. Supposedly to the point where it becomes impossible to ride your bike through certain parts of campus (and this is a rule enforced by the police).
On Friday I hitched a ride with Ryan into San Francisco via Berkeley Bowl. Berkeley lacks many chain supermarkets like Walmart (although there is one about 30 minutes drive away). They do have this wonderful independent supermarket called Berkeley Bowl - which has two branches here. It's more expensive than most chain supermarkets but they stock an amazing variety of what Americans call 'produce' (what we know as fruit and vegetables). This section literally spans a good third of their floor space and could itself be as large as most 'supermarkets'. What's more amazing is how well stocked this is - with fruit piled up to chest height. Ryan informs me that these stock levels are basically maintained all the time - so it wasn't just a case of arriving after the fruit had been delivered.
Arriving to San Francisco, I hopped into a cafe to take our weekly CPCC call where I had some lovely oolong green tea which almost certainly pushed me into a hyperthyroid state (dangerous!). After this, I visited Mission Bikes - a bike shop I've often admired online. It was considerably smaller than I was expecting, but was full of many cool bicycle accessories which were mostly the result of Kickstarter campaigns (such as a Blink / Steady and RevoLights).
Having made plans to go for lunch with my friend Alex from both HABS and Cambridge at his office, I had some time to kill, so stumbled into another coffee shop with a bizarrely heavyset door. This was my first warning and the sarcastically passive aggressive but amusing signs ('You'll find that it is preferable to take your call outside') were another. I ordered a rooibos tea and a wonderful peanut butter cookie and sat down to read my Kindle in near silence. Like with the coffee shop studying culture on campus, it seems like coffee shops in San Francisco are where developers go to work on their Macs. It felt like most libraries and I was very self conscious as I chewed on my cookie and tried to sip my tea as quietly as possible.
Lunch at Asana, where Alex works, was excellent and I enjoyed meeting his zany but fun tech colleagues. I was a little puzzled by the government sticker on the front door that warned of 'cancer causing chemicals' being present in the building but supposedly this is standard in most buildings in the mission. The top floor where their office is located has fantastic views of the city and on one side, it looks as if the Earth is folding up into the building a la Inception. I later realised this was a hill.
After wandering around Best Buy and trying out some of the Andrew Jones designed Pioneer speakers (which are excellent by the way), I took the BART back to Berkeley and napped a little before heading out to a party hosted by the East Bay Burners that Natalie invited us to.
The East Bay Burners is a group of Burning Man enthusiasts who fundraise, build displays and organise a trip to the hippie festival every year. This was one of their final parties before the actual event in a couple of weeks and we got to hang out in 'NIMBY', a warehouse space where they build the exhibits they take with them. The dress code was 'dress to impress' which I suspected would be the only chance I will get to dress formally in the next few months. Wearing a suede jacket, shirt and tie, I was put to shame by a trio of Natalie's friend's friends who were wearing full formal wear (including a three piece suit) lined with luminescent wire. We met some truly wacky characters there including one guy was wearing a black bin bag and was just completely crazy - words cannot describe him.
On Saturday I met up with TDA Sam, who is finishing off his undergraduate degree at Berkeley ahead of law school, which was great. That afternoon I met up with Alex to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge - which was manageable but hard work on my fixie (the Ti bike is still in pieces). In the evening, I went to meet a subset of my MEng class at a cool pool bar called 'Thalassa' in Downtown Berkeley. It was amusing to see some of the international students struggle with their beer.
I spent Sunday doing some final preparation ahead of the start of MEng bootcamp on Monday and visiting Alex's garden party in San Francisco. It's amusing how easy it is to find developers who work for well known technology companies - I met engineers at Twitter and Facebook there, and nearly everyone else worked in technology. That evening I went out with Ryan and his girlfriend, to a pizza restaurant called Jupiter. I was sceptical, having spent two weeks in Italy so recently but it was tasty, tasty pizza.
With that, my brief period of unemployment came to an end.
On Thursday I met up with some of my classmates from India who I had spoken with previously online. We had lunch at Subway - which I suppose I had to experience once, but will try not to visit again (not when there are so many independent awesome little restaurants and cafes around campus). Around campus are basically all of the foods I love to eat back home with my friends - including many Asian (Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants), several bubble tea cafes that all serve matcha and a Chinese bakery!
Studying here also seems to be primarily done either on the grass on campus (where I am sitting now) or in coffee shops with a laptop out and headphones in. This is very different to my undergraduate experience at Cambridge - although they had recently opened a coffee shop in college when I left. Perhaps this is due to the lack of electric kettles in most American households, students need to get their caffeine fix externally.
In general, the Berkeley campus, although being a well ranked university, in the top five globally and the best public university in the world, appears to lack much of the pretentiousness that Cambridge has. While I enjoyed dressing up in a suit and acting like high society at Fitz, I do admire the casual but super intelligent attitude that students here have. While buildings here aren't nearly as old as at Cambridge, they are remarkably impressive. The campus isn't huge but is quite dense - with notable buildings around every corner. (Most of these buildings seem to house coffee shops too. There are also two very large libraries that are connected by an underground tunnel. I've not found a reason to use these yet though.)
It's busy at the moment but I'm told it will get considerably busier in a couple of weeks as all the undergraduates return. Supposedly to the point where it becomes impossible to ride your bike through certain parts of campus (and this is a rule enforced by the police).
On Friday I hitched a ride with Ryan into San Francisco via Berkeley Bowl. Berkeley lacks many chain supermarkets like Walmart (although there is one about 30 minutes drive away). They do have this wonderful independent supermarket called Berkeley Bowl - which has two branches here. It's more expensive than most chain supermarkets but they stock an amazing variety of what Americans call 'produce' (what we know as fruit and vegetables). This section literally spans a good third of their floor space and could itself be as large as most 'supermarkets'. What's more amazing is how well stocked this is - with fruit piled up to chest height. Ryan informs me that these stock levels are basically maintained all the time - so it wasn't just a case of arriving after the fruit had been delivered.
Arriving to San Francisco, I hopped into a cafe to take our weekly CPCC call where I had some lovely oolong green tea which almost certainly pushed me into a hyperthyroid state (dangerous!). After this, I visited Mission Bikes - a bike shop I've often admired online. It was considerably smaller than I was expecting, but was full of many cool bicycle accessories which were mostly the result of Kickstarter campaigns (such as a Blink / Steady and RevoLights).
Having made plans to go for lunch with my friend Alex from both HABS and Cambridge at his office, I had some time to kill, so stumbled into another coffee shop with a bizarrely heavyset door. This was my first warning and the sarcastically passive aggressive but amusing signs ('You'll find that it is preferable to take your call outside') were another. I ordered a rooibos tea and a wonderful peanut butter cookie and sat down to read my Kindle in near silence. Like with the coffee shop studying culture on campus, it seems like coffee shops in San Francisco are where developers go to work on their Macs. It felt like most libraries and I was very self conscious as I chewed on my cookie and tried to sip my tea as quietly as possible.
Lunch at Asana, where Alex works, was excellent and I enjoyed meeting his zany but fun tech colleagues. I was a little puzzled by the government sticker on the front door that warned of 'cancer causing chemicals' being present in the building but supposedly this is standard in most buildings in the mission. The top floor where their office is located has fantastic views of the city and on one side, it looks as if the Earth is folding up into the building a la Inception. I later realised this was a hill.
After wandering around Best Buy and trying out some of the Andrew Jones designed Pioneer speakers (which are excellent by the way), I took the BART back to Berkeley and napped a little before heading out to a party hosted by the East Bay Burners that Natalie invited us to.
The East Bay Burners is a group of Burning Man enthusiasts who fundraise, build displays and organise a trip to the hippie festival every year. This was one of their final parties before the actual event in a couple of weeks and we got to hang out in 'NIMBY', a warehouse space where they build the exhibits they take with them. The dress code was 'dress to impress' which I suspected would be the only chance I will get to dress formally in the next few months. Wearing a suede jacket, shirt and tie, I was put to shame by a trio of Natalie's friend's friends who were wearing full formal wear (including a three piece suit) lined with luminescent wire. We met some truly wacky characters there including one guy was wearing a black bin bag and was just completely crazy - words cannot describe him.
On Saturday I met up with TDA Sam, who is finishing off his undergraduate degree at Berkeley ahead of law school, which was great. That afternoon I met up with Alex to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge - which was manageable but hard work on my fixie (the Ti bike is still in pieces). In the evening, I went to meet a subset of my MEng class at a cool pool bar called 'Thalassa' in Downtown Berkeley. It was amusing to see some of the international students struggle with their beer.
I spent Sunday doing some final preparation ahead of the start of MEng bootcamp on Monday and visiting Alex's garden party in San Francisco. It's amusing how easy it is to find developers who work for well known technology companies - I met engineers at Twitter and Facebook there, and nearly everyone else worked in technology. That evening I went out with Ryan and his girlfriend, to a pizza restaurant called Jupiter. I was sceptical, having spent two weeks in Italy so recently but it was tasty, tasty pizza.
With that, my brief period of unemployment came to an end.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
On Wednesday, while I still had the rental car, I tried to knock off as many things on my 'to-do' list as possible. The first task was to pick up a 'Markus' IKEA chair that I bought second hand from Craigslist for half the price it cost new. This is the same chair I have at home, although sadly in black instead of orange. Following this, I went to set up my bank account, pick up a student card and get myself a local sim card.
Setting up the bank account with Citi was, luckily, painless - I've heard stories of my peers being asked to keep a minimum monthly balance of $1,500 in their accounts which is absolutely absurd.
I also found it amazing that there is a whole office on campus whose sole purpose is just to administer student cards, but looking at the statistics on Wikipedia, I see that UC Berkeley has approximately double the number of students that Cambridge had (at 36,000). There are apparently larger universities around, my flatmate Natalie mentioned that the University of Florida has 50,000 odd students. That sort of scale is unbelievable.
Soon after, I had bought a local sim card on a MVNO called Ultra Mobile. This gave me a fantastic feeling of mobility. While OsmAnd+ is fantastic, Google Maps provides a much slicker navigation app and this really helped me out. The network in the Bay Area seems considerably quicker than back home too and pages load faster. (Ultra Mobile uses T-Mobile's network which supposedly has poor coverage in the area. I haven't found it a problem at all yet though.) Ultra Mobile also includes $20 worth of international calling credit each month which has proven very useful - I can call home at just 5c a minute.
Sadly I then had to return to IKEA for a third time to pick up curtains and a curtain rail. I later went back a fourth time to change the curtain rail for thinner rail that actually fit the hooks in my room. I also stopped at Trader Joes to pick up an inital lot of groceries (while I had the car) and Wholefoods to pick up cleaning materials and shampoo.
The groceries are sold in much larger packs here than in Europe. On average, at least at these two shops, they're more costly than at the places we usually shop at back home. You do, however, get larger quantities of everything, so perhaps it's not actually much more expensive. It's also probably not fair to compare these to normal supermarkets but more to, say, M&S and Waitrose. Food also lasts longer in my fridge. It's unclear whether this is because of the sheer size of the fridge or because of all the preservatives used in the food.
In the end, I was able to buy 32 ounces of shampoo for $6 (admittedly the most budget shampoo they sold) - this should be enough to last me until graduation... Another thing I learnt though was that when they sell shampoo as 'odour-free' here, it actually means it smells like cigarette ash when wet (but is hopefully odour-free when dry). I'll see how this affects my romantic prospects!
The groceries on the whole are quite exciting. Generally American supermarkets seem to be quite heavily filled with sweet and sugary food but they do also offer many of the products I love - which are considered niche back home. For instance, a good friend of mine introduced to an Eastern European drink called 'kefir', a fermented yoghurt drink. This is normally only found in Polish shops back home but is available in several supermarkets here. I also drink a considerable amount of almond milk - primarily for the taste. This has only just been introduced back home but is available in multiple brands and flavours here. Finally, the cottage cheese is as good as the cottage cheese you can buy in Switzerland which, up until now, was the best I'd tried. (Oh, there's also SO MUCH tofu available.)
After the fourth trip to IKEA, I returned the car to Hertz, carrying my fixie in the back. I had to fill the car up with fuel (or 'gas') before returning it. This was a hilarious exercise involving two trips to the cashier since, by this point, Halifax had blocked my credit card. Apparently buying furniture in America is considerably more suspicious than buying pizza in Italy, as I had done just a few weeks ago.
It was unclear whether, when asking for $20 of gas, I'd get any money back if the final amount came to less than $20. The cashier was terribly confused too and so I decided to pay for fuel in $10 chunks so as to minimise any potential downside. When, after the first $10, the gas tank still wasn't showing full, I went back again with another $10 and thankfully managed to fill the tank and get a refund for the $1.88 that was unused. Thus continued the slow journey towards naturalisation.
I cycled back to the flat without a problem, struggling up the final hill. The campus is built on a hill and this makes it nearly all downhill in the morning and almost entirely uphill on the return journey. It's particularly hard work on my fixie with an 18 tooth cog which is perfectly suited for flat roads but less so for steep hills! It requires basically spinning at 100% effort just to keep moving else there's a risk of falling off or veering into a parked car (as I've done once already). By the time I reach home my shirt is usually soaked with sweat. I'm hoping this will get easier with time.
I met my second flatmate that evening, Natalie, who recently finished a spell working for the Peace Corps in Panama. I plugged my Cowon into Ryan's set of Logitech speakers and spent the rest of the evening unpacking and using the replacement screwdriver I picked up to finish off the bed.
Continued.
Setting up the bank account with Citi was, luckily, painless - I've heard stories of my peers being asked to keep a minimum monthly balance of $1,500 in their accounts which is absolutely absurd.
I also found it amazing that there is a whole office on campus whose sole purpose is just to administer student cards, but looking at the statistics on Wikipedia, I see that UC Berkeley has approximately double the number of students that Cambridge had (at 36,000). There are apparently larger universities around, my flatmate Natalie mentioned that the University of Florida has 50,000 odd students. That sort of scale is unbelievable.
Soon after, I had bought a local sim card on a MVNO called Ultra Mobile. This gave me a fantastic feeling of mobility. While OsmAnd+ is fantastic, Google Maps provides a much slicker navigation app and this really helped me out. The network in the Bay Area seems considerably quicker than back home too and pages load faster. (Ultra Mobile uses T-Mobile's network which supposedly has poor coverage in the area. I haven't found it a problem at all yet though.) Ultra Mobile also includes $20 worth of international calling credit each month which has proven very useful - I can call home at just 5c a minute.
Sadly I then had to return to IKEA for a third time to pick up curtains and a curtain rail. I later went back a fourth time to change the curtain rail for thinner rail that actually fit the hooks in my room. I also stopped at Trader Joes to pick up an inital lot of groceries (while I had the car) and Wholefoods to pick up cleaning materials and shampoo.
The groceries are sold in much larger packs here than in Europe. On average, at least at these two shops, they're more costly than at the places we usually shop at back home. You do, however, get larger quantities of everything, so perhaps it's not actually much more expensive. It's also probably not fair to compare these to normal supermarkets but more to, say, M&S and Waitrose. Food also lasts longer in my fridge. It's unclear whether this is because of the sheer size of the fridge or because of all the preservatives used in the food.
In the end, I was able to buy 32 ounces of shampoo for $6 (admittedly the most budget shampoo they sold) - this should be enough to last me until graduation... Another thing I learnt though was that when they sell shampoo as 'odour-free' here, it actually means it smells like cigarette ash when wet (but is hopefully odour-free when dry). I'll see how this affects my romantic prospects!
The groceries on the whole are quite exciting. Generally American supermarkets seem to be quite heavily filled with sweet and sugary food but they do also offer many of the products I love - which are considered niche back home. For instance, a good friend of mine introduced to an Eastern European drink called 'kefir', a fermented yoghurt drink. This is normally only found in Polish shops back home but is available in several supermarkets here. I also drink a considerable amount of almond milk - primarily for the taste. This has only just been introduced back home but is available in multiple brands and flavours here. Finally, the cottage cheese is as good as the cottage cheese you can buy in Switzerland which, up until now, was the best I'd tried. (Oh, there's also SO MUCH tofu available.)
After the fourth trip to IKEA, I returned the car to Hertz, carrying my fixie in the back. I had to fill the car up with fuel (or 'gas') before returning it. This was a hilarious exercise involving two trips to the cashier since, by this point, Halifax had blocked my credit card. Apparently buying furniture in America is considerably more suspicious than buying pizza in Italy, as I had done just a few weeks ago.
It was unclear whether, when asking for $20 of gas, I'd get any money back if the final amount came to less than $20. The cashier was terribly confused too and so I decided to pay for fuel in $10 chunks so as to minimise any potential downside. When, after the first $10, the gas tank still wasn't showing full, I went back again with another $10 and thankfully managed to fill the tank and get a refund for the $1.88 that was unused. Thus continued the slow journey towards naturalisation.
I cycled back to the flat without a problem, struggling up the final hill. The campus is built on a hill and this makes it nearly all downhill in the morning and almost entirely uphill on the return journey. It's particularly hard work on my fixie with an 18 tooth cog which is perfectly suited for flat roads but less so for steep hills! It requires basically spinning at 100% effort just to keep moving else there's a risk of falling off or veering into a parked car (as I've done once already). By the time I reach home my shirt is usually soaked with sweat. I'm hoping this will get easier with time.
I met my second flatmate that evening, Natalie, who recently finished a spell working for the Peace Corps in Panama. I plugged my Cowon into Ryan's set of Logitech speakers and spent the rest of the evening unpacking and using the replacement screwdriver I picked up to finish off the bed.
Continued.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
The minivan I'd rented was a fully automatic Dodge Caravan, which, even with all of my 'stuff' in it, still had space for five adults to sit comfortably. It was huge. Equipped with handwritten directions from the Hertz check-in lady, who was either called 'Trainee' or was new to the job, and my phone running OsmAnd+, I rolled out into San Francisco amidst their Tuesday evening rush hour.
This wasn't too bad, thankfully and I crossed Bay Bridge relatively quickly, with only the occasional nervous moment as I used the dominating size of the Dodge to effortlessly change lanes. As I neared Berkeley, I saw IKEA and, with some vague notion of efficiency in my mind, took the ramp off the highway and spent a third of an hour trying to find the entrance. Eventually I made it to the parking lot and was about to go in but realised I should probably check the dimensions of my room before buying furniture. With that in mind, I navigated towards Panoramic Way.
Thankfully it was just a short drive (a drive I'd do several more times) and I quickly found Panoramic Way, my home for the next 10 months. Despite 'walking' down the street using StreetView and reading the surprisingly extensive Wikipedia page about Panoramic Way, I was still shocked by how narrow and windy it was. It was nothing like any other street I've ever driven down in North America. This turned out to be a pain to navigate, particularly with my large minivan. After finding a steep but wide part of the street to turn around in, I eventually located our flat at 7:30pm.
There had been some confusion in the email exchange between Ryan, the current leaseholder and primary 'flatmate', and I. I had thought he was leaving a spare key for me at the flat and he thought I was collecting it from his office in San Francisco. After discovering that the flat was empty, I called him up and, working hard at his new job, he wouldn't be back to Berkeley until past 9pm. I thus decided to go back to IKEA.
This time, after parking, I actually went into the store and proceeded to buy a full-size (or double) bed (having arranged a desk and chair on Craigslist). This was a complete headache, particularly in my tired state of mind, and I eventually settled on a combination that was one above the cheapest but looked relatively easy to assemble and came with a reasonably firm mattress. To my dismay, the bed itself was preassembled and was far too large to fit into even this minivan. Not wanting to trek back through the store, I used the help computers to try and figure out what alternatives I had and eventually settled on a double bed with slats that required more assembly but would fit inside the car. This was a good workout for my lacking upper body - the mattress alone weighed more than 25 kilograms.
On my way back I stopped off at one of the Craiglist vendor's house to pick up an IKEA desk which he was selling for $70. I can't work out if this was a good deal or not since they no longer sell this desk but it seems to do the job, if being a little wobbly (as IKEA desks eventually become). In my sleep deprived state, I managed to park in a red zone, where the curb is painted red and where it is illegal to park. This would probably have been OK if two fire engines hadn't then tried to navigate the corner and I was politely warned by one of them that I was parked in a red zone. I quickly moved the Dodge.
Returning to Panoramic Way at 10pm, Ryan had been held up at work and was still on his way back so I decided to start unloading my car. This was exhausting - particularly because our flat is at the top of an extended flight of stairs. I managed this eventually though and when Ryan arrived a short while later, he helped me take everything into the flat.
I was pleasantly surprised with the size of the flat. Expecting something smaller and more akin to the narrow English flats, it was a small relief to see wider staircases and a corridor wide enough to fit a couch. The kitchen and living room are also more than adequate and my room, although small, has enough space for me, my computer, dhol, clothes and a bike. (And a bed and desk of course.)
The furniture mostly worked out OK - although the bed was about 2 inches too large to slot nicely into the narrower portion of the room, so I had to put it against one of the two longer walls. Building the bed was a pain and I felt guilty at the amount of noise (and subsequent cursing) I produced in the process. I also managed to strip the screwdriver that Ryan had kindly lent me, which made it increasingly tough to screw everything in tightly enough (and I have a nice blister on my palm as a result). Eventually it would go no further and I left a couple of diagonal slats out, put my mattress down and nodded off to sleep after a 27 hour waking day.
Continued.
This wasn't too bad, thankfully and I crossed Bay Bridge relatively quickly, with only the occasional nervous moment as I used the dominating size of the Dodge to effortlessly change lanes. As I neared Berkeley, I saw IKEA and, with some vague notion of efficiency in my mind, took the ramp off the highway and spent a third of an hour trying to find the entrance. Eventually I made it to the parking lot and was about to go in but realised I should probably check the dimensions of my room before buying furniture. With that in mind, I navigated towards Panoramic Way.
Thankfully it was just a short drive (a drive I'd do several more times) and I quickly found Panoramic Way, my home for the next 10 months. Despite 'walking' down the street using StreetView and reading the surprisingly extensive Wikipedia page about Panoramic Way, I was still shocked by how narrow and windy it was. It was nothing like any other street I've ever driven down in North America. This turned out to be a pain to navigate, particularly with my large minivan. After finding a steep but wide part of the street to turn around in, I eventually located our flat at 7:30pm.
There had been some confusion in the email exchange between Ryan, the current leaseholder and primary 'flatmate', and I. I had thought he was leaving a spare key for me at the flat and he thought I was collecting it from his office in San Francisco. After discovering that the flat was empty, I called him up and, working hard at his new job, he wouldn't be back to Berkeley until past 9pm. I thus decided to go back to IKEA.
This time, after parking, I actually went into the store and proceeded to buy a full-size (or double) bed (having arranged a desk and chair on Craigslist). This was a complete headache, particularly in my tired state of mind, and I eventually settled on a combination that was one above the cheapest but looked relatively easy to assemble and came with a reasonably firm mattress. To my dismay, the bed itself was preassembled and was far too large to fit into even this minivan. Not wanting to trek back through the store, I used the help computers to try and figure out what alternatives I had and eventually settled on a double bed with slats that required more assembly but would fit inside the car. This was a good workout for my lacking upper body - the mattress alone weighed more than 25 kilograms.
On my way back I stopped off at one of the Craiglist vendor's house to pick up an IKEA desk which he was selling for $70. I can't work out if this was a good deal or not since they no longer sell this desk but it seems to do the job, if being a little wobbly (as IKEA desks eventually become). In my sleep deprived state, I managed to park in a red zone, where the curb is painted red and where it is illegal to park. This would probably have been OK if two fire engines hadn't then tried to navigate the corner and I was politely warned by one of them that I was parked in a red zone. I quickly moved the Dodge.
Returning to Panoramic Way at 10pm, Ryan had been held up at work and was still on his way back so I decided to start unloading my car. This was exhausting - particularly because our flat is at the top of an extended flight of stairs. I managed this eventually though and when Ryan arrived a short while later, he helped me take everything into the flat.
I was pleasantly surprised with the size of the flat. Expecting something smaller and more akin to the narrow English flats, it was a small relief to see wider staircases and a corridor wide enough to fit a couch. The kitchen and living room are also more than adequate and my room, although small, has enough space for me, my computer, dhol, clothes and a bike. (And a bed and desk of course.)
The furniture mostly worked out OK - although the bed was about 2 inches too large to slot nicely into the narrower portion of the room, so I had to put it against one of the two longer walls. Building the bed was a pain and I felt guilty at the amount of noise (and subsequent cursing) I produced in the process. I also managed to strip the screwdriver that Ryan had kindly lent me, which made it increasingly tough to screw everything in tightly enough (and I have a nice blister on my palm as a result). Eventually it would go no further and I left a couple of diagonal slats out, put my mattress down and nodded off to sleep after a 27 hour waking day.
Continued.
No comments yet
No comments yet!
Posts