Anxiously Awaiting

I was accepted to Georgia Tech for my masters in computer science. It’s going to be interesting figuring out how I can juggle college life and full time work at MSFT. Prayer would be appreciated, as I have a lot of decisions to make in a short amount of time. I thought I was going to be considered for the Spring 2009 Semester, but it appears that I was let in for Fall 2008. That means I start classes in a week (o.O). It’s a bit overwhelming, but I figure everything will probably work out.

Hello college kid with full time MSFT work. Some responsibilities will need to be dropped for this to be feasible, and I’m working on figuring out what those are.

I spent my first night at the TSRB. When I said earlier that this semester was busier than last, I wasn’t kidding. I’m taking a couple of hours off just so I can get my head back and do some pleasure reading, but after that it’s back to the mines. I came up with a pretty cool idea for a research project a while back, and I’m pretty excited that I was able to expand up on it and present it to the folks in my research group. It’s a relatively hard problem so I am probably going to outsource some stuff for my sanity’s sake. I don’t need to be trying to implement 4 projects and write papers on them. Two is certainly enough.

Pics are still broken mainly because I’m too burned out to write anything that resembles code right now. Most of the past night and the day before was spent hacking C++ so that it works on my target platform. Unfortunately, I broke said platform right before my demo–the odds of which are not stunningly low when you take my luck into account–so I was forced to improvise. I came up with a pretty cool and hopefully informative demo about some Machine Learning concepts that I want to integrate into my projects.

I’m slightly satisfied in my work for a change.

Work comes in torrents. It appears that this semester, although it be only 17 hours, is going to be busier than last. I need to finish my research work for PURA, start work on my capstone research project, write two research papers, and keep up with four classes. My schedule looks like a sine wave. Only a class and a meeting on Mondays, three classes on Tuesday, a class and a meeting on Wednesday, three classes and a meeting on Thursday, and then nothing on Friday. It seems to me that most of this time spent in meetings could be applied to implementation instead, but I don’t make the rules =D.

Pray for me or I will go insane.

And so begins the last glorious semester of my academic slavery to Georgia Institute of Technology as an undergraduate. The first week has been a torrent of schedule coordination, setting up meetings, and figuring out which books I can get by without buying. I am most excited about my machine learning class this semester, and I hope to incorporate it somehow in the research work that I am doing. The ideas I have gleaned from the first week of class have fascinated me to the point of perhaps revamping my specialization choices. More on this after I soak in the class for a while. Some of the ideas seem to be a little tough to swallow.

I am officially finished with school for this semester.  Well, except for all the administrative tasks I have left to do like finishing my PURA paperwork, writing a research proposal by Friday so I can graduate, and studying for the GRE that I am scheduled to endure on Monday.  It’s been a very hard 18 hours this semester, and as much as I complain about it I’m doing it again next semester.  But the next one is the last one, so I’m going to go out with a bang =).