Oops, I kind of forgot I had a blog. A lot has happened in the past semester and a half....
I'm living up in Davis Square at Sluglabs with Femtomatt, Jake, and (last semester) Ben. I have a nice little room, it's only ~20min. on the Red Line to campus, and Davis Square is pretty nice - there are some good places to eat nearby.
Also I've been TAing! Last semester I was a TA for 6.034, I was a lab assistant for 6.189 over IAP with Reid and Jackie (it was an intro Python programming course during IAP for mostly freshmen), and this semester I am TAing 6.004. it's been fun/interesting/educational, especially trying to teach intro programming because it forced me to think about how to explain many of the concepts that I take for granted as a course 6 person, to people who had never seen them before.
6.034 and 6.004 are pretty different classes to TA. For 6.034 I only had to prepare one lesson per week, and I didn't have office hours, so I'd mostly answer questions by email. For 6.004, we have two lessons to prepare each week, but they're pretty well-defined from previous semesters (i.e. the tutorial problems that are the same each year). We also have to staff lab hours (8 per week) which seemed like a lot in the beginning, but mostly they've been pretty quiet (I anticipate this will change once the Beta assignment goes out!) and also it means that students bring their questions to lab instead of sending a lot of emails, so it all kind of evens out. It's also been really fun to basically take these two classes over again - Winston's lectures are still awesome, and it's really good to review 6.004 stuff as well since it's not really my area of exprtise, but it's definitely stuff that every course 6 person should know.
Last semester I took Machine Learning with just about all of East Campus. Over IAP I had an enlightening meeting with Anne Hunter where we determined that if I switched to the "new" M.Eng. curriculum, that I could be completely done with classes right then. This was great news because it's meant that I've had more time to work on my thesis this semester. However, I thought it would just be too weird to be at MIT and not take any classes at all, so I am taking 6.345 (Automatic
Speech Recognition) as a listener, and the lectures for that have all been really great so far.
Speaking of my thesis, it's going alright at the moment, and it looks like I just might have a chance of finishing it this semester if I keep up the momentum I have on it. I'm working with Boris and Sue at Infolab on a question answering system
(http://start.csail.mit.edu) and my project is to make the system able to detect and correct the kinds of errors that happen when the webpages we rely on for our answers change their format.
I've also been trying to figure out what I will do next year! Back in the fall, I got a full-time offer from Google in NYC, and I also applied to grad schools. I've visited Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins already, and I'll visit Columbia in April. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet (I want to visit all of the schools before I decide), but I know I really like this speech and language stuff, so most likely it will be grad school. I'm a bit sad to be leaving MIT, but after five years here, I definitley feel like it would be good to spend some time somewhere else - yay for new places!
Monday, March 15, 2010
Saturday, August 22, 2009
End of Summer
it's been a while since I last updated. many adventures were had in NYC:
-Spent a weekend in Manhattan with some friends from high school. Saw some live music. Went to the MoMA. Got yelled at by an angry bakery lady. Sat on a giant ice cube in Union Square.
-Spent a weekend in Staten Island, visiting my sister. We hit up the art store and scared some small children with the goodies in the Halloween section. We also taught ourselves to crochet, and saw both Batman, the Movie, and The Dark Knight.
-Went on a field trip to the zoo with Google. Saw the butterflies, giraffes, peacocks, owls, monkeys, and of course the elephants.
-had my last week at Google. I made a poster, gave a presentation, and went on a boat.
-Spent a few more days in NYC, just for funsies. I got to see Tammy and Inessa, and we went to Central Park, Chinatown, and an awesome sushi place in Brooklyn.
-Got to see Shuai, who was also visiting NY, and my friend Natalie from high school. We went to a yummy cupcake place in the west village. We tried to see a play called "I Can Has Cheezburger! The MusicLOL" but it was sold out. So instead, we went to Chinatown for some delicious soup dumplings.
-Went back to Google for my conversion interview, and also to play Rock Band with the Speech group.
-Went to Pennsylvania with my dad and stepmom, to visit her brother and to look at some cool art.
So, I would say that I had a pretty successful summer. I got to see a lot of the city, and I did not get eaten. I miss working at Google, and being in the city! Things are going to be pretty different this semester - I won't be living on putz, I'll only be taking one class, I'll be helping to teach a class, and I'll have a thesis to write - but I am definitely looking forward to being back in Boston and at MIT. I'm going back on Tuesday - on to the next adventure!
-Spent a weekend in Manhattan with some friends from high school. Saw some live music. Went to the MoMA. Got yelled at by an angry bakery lady. Sat on a giant ice cube in Union Square.
-Spent a weekend in Staten Island, visiting my sister. We hit up the art store and scared some small children with the goodies in the Halloween section. We also taught ourselves to crochet, and saw both Batman, the Movie, and The Dark Knight.
-Went on a field trip to the zoo with Google. Saw the butterflies, giraffes, peacocks, owls, monkeys, and of course the elephants.
-had my last week at Google. I made a poster, gave a presentation, and went on a boat.
-Spent a few more days in NYC, just for funsies. I got to see Tammy and Inessa, and we went to Central Park, Chinatown, and an awesome sushi place in Brooklyn.
-Got to see Shuai, who was also visiting NY, and my friend Natalie from high school. We went to a yummy cupcake place in the west village. We tried to see a play called "I Can Has Cheezburger! The MusicLOL" but it was sold out. So instead, we went to Chinatown for some delicious soup dumplings.
-Went back to Google for my conversion interview, and also to play Rock Band with the Speech group.
-Went to Pennsylvania with my dad and stepmom, to visit her brother and to look at some cool art.
So, I would say that I had a pretty successful summer. I got to see a lot of the city, and I did not get eaten. I miss working at Google, and being in the city! Things are going to be pretty different this semester - I won't be living on putz, I'll only be taking one class, I'll be helping to teach a class, and I'll have a thesis to write - but I am definitely looking forward to being back in Boston and at MIT. I'm going back on Tuesday - on to the next adventure!
Saturday, July 11, 2009
First Post!!!
I have decided to jump on the Putz Blogging Bandwagon and chronicle my adventures. I have been working at Google in NYC this summer along with Young Flops and Uncle Harvey. My project is with the Speech Team, and it's been awesome.
This is the first summer since high school that I've been home for the whole summer - I am living at my dad's house up in Irvington, which is where I went to high school, and since many of my friends are home for the summer as well, it's been really nice to be able to hang out with them.
Irvington's about an hour's commute from where I work, and one thing that I've learned this summer is that I don't particularly like commuting. So I've ended up mostly staying at my dad's office during the week (he's a psychoanalyst, so 'office' really means 'room with comfy couch') and coming back to Irvington on the weekends. I just have to make sure to not make a mess and to clear out before my dad has to actually work in his office, but it's totally worth it to not have to commute.
I've really been enjoying wandering around the city and exploring. So far I've explored around Grand Central and Times Square, the Village, and around Chelsea where I work. I am looking forward to the possibility of a dim sum trip to Chinatown, and of Shakespeare in the Park on the recommendation of Young Nessle.
On a recent Saturday, my mom and I went to a new Titanic exhibit in Times Square. There were all these different artifacts that they brought up from the shipwreck. It was really interesting to see that all these big, heavy iron boat parts were all corroded from the iron-eating bacteria that live in the ocean - they were corroded so much and in such a way that they looked all streaky and knotted like wood, but these tiny little objects made out of other types of metal had hardly corroded at all.
Here is a list of other random/interesting/funny things I've seen in NYC so far:
-A delivery truck with a big picture of a fish on the side, underneath of which was written, "Meat Without Feet"
-A guy with one of those bicycle rickshaws getting arrested in Times Square
-The Sky Line Park - they made a new park on this old elevated freight railroad track. It's awesome. If you're in NYC, you should check it out.
For the Fourth of July weekend, I visited Reid out in California! About five minutes before I was planning to leave work on Thursday, I was telling one of the full-timers who I work with about my plans for the weekend, when he said, "Oh, if you had planned to stay for a few more days, you could have visited and worked from the Mountain View office!" I was really surprised because I didn't know that interns could do that, but apparently they can, and it seemed like too much of an awesome idea not to at least try to do it. It turned out that even at the last minute, I was able to change my flight and get a desk to work at with the Speech Team in Mountain View - and I'm really glad I did it, because I got to spend a few more days with Reid, see the Mountain View office (which is huge! they have all these buildings! and so many trees!), and also meet the Mountain View Speech Team, who were super awesome about my randomly showing up for three days.
Over the weekend in California, we went to a beach that had tidepools with sea anemones and hermit crabs, and we went to the Farmers' Market in San Francisco and the SF MoMA, which had an exhibit on the photography of Robert Frank and another exhibit of Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe. We had lunch at this place that was on a cliff, and it was at the site of the San Francisco bath houses, which were built in the 1920s I think, and torn down in the '80s on account of the AIDS epidemic. It was really cool because afterwards we explored the ruins, which consisted of some foundations or walls of the pools that you could walk along, some staircases, and caves. For the Fourth of July, we had a barbecue with Reid's family and his friend's family. On Sunday we went to a beach in Santa Cruz, and it was nice and warm and sunny but the water was too cold for me to swim in. Overall I had a really nice trip to California, and it was especially nice to get to stay a few extra days! And now I'm back in New York.
This is the first summer since high school that I've been home for the whole summer - I am living at my dad's house up in Irvington, which is where I went to high school, and since many of my friends are home for the summer as well, it's been really nice to be able to hang out with them.
Irvington's about an hour's commute from where I work, and one thing that I've learned this summer is that I don't particularly like commuting. So I've ended up mostly staying at my dad's office during the week (he's a psychoanalyst, so 'office' really means 'room with comfy couch') and coming back to Irvington on the weekends. I just have to make sure to not make a mess and to clear out before my dad has to actually work in his office, but it's totally worth it to not have to commute.
I've really been enjoying wandering around the city and exploring. So far I've explored around Grand Central and Times Square, the Village, and around Chelsea where I work. I am looking forward to the possibility of a dim sum trip to Chinatown, and of Shakespeare in the Park on the recommendation of Young Nessle.
On a recent Saturday, my mom and I went to a new Titanic exhibit in Times Square. There were all these different artifacts that they brought up from the shipwreck. It was really interesting to see that all these big, heavy iron boat parts were all corroded from the iron-eating bacteria that live in the ocean - they were corroded so much and in such a way that they looked all streaky and knotted like wood, but these tiny little objects made out of other types of metal had hardly corroded at all.
Here is a list of other random/interesting/funny things I've seen in NYC so far:
-A delivery truck with a big picture of a fish on the side, underneath of which was written, "Meat Without Feet"
-A guy with one of those bicycle rickshaws getting arrested in Times Square
-The Sky Line Park - they made a new park on this old elevated freight railroad track. It's awesome. If you're in NYC, you should check it out.
For the Fourth of July weekend, I visited Reid out in California! About five minutes before I was planning to leave work on Thursday, I was telling one of the full-timers who I work with about my plans for the weekend, when he said, "Oh, if you had planned to stay for a few more days, you could have visited and worked from the Mountain View office!" I was really surprised because I didn't know that interns could do that, but apparently they can, and it seemed like too much of an awesome idea not to at least try to do it. It turned out that even at the last minute, I was able to change my flight and get a desk to work at with the Speech Team in Mountain View - and I'm really glad I did it, because I got to spend a few more days with Reid, see the Mountain View office (which is huge! they have all these buildings! and so many trees!), and also meet the Mountain View Speech Team, who were super awesome about my randomly showing up for three days.
Over the weekend in California, we went to a beach that had tidepools with sea anemones and hermit crabs, and we went to the Farmers' Market in San Francisco and the SF MoMA, which had an exhibit on the photography of Robert Frank and another exhibit of Ansel Adams and Georgia O'Keeffe. We had lunch at this place that was on a cliff, and it was at the site of the San Francisco bath houses, which were built in the 1920s I think, and torn down in the '80s on account of the AIDS epidemic. It was really cool because afterwards we explored the ruins, which consisted of some foundations or walls of the pools that you could walk along, some staircases, and caves. For the Fourth of July, we had a barbecue with Reid's family and his friend's family. On Sunday we went to a beach in Santa Cruz, and it was nice and warm and sunny but the water was too cold for me to swim in. Overall I had a really nice trip to California, and it was especially nice to get to stay a few extra days! And now I'm back in New York.
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