adam.oliner.net

Well, don’t I feel silly? Just as Daniel and I were in the midst of searching remotely for apartments in the greater Cambridge area, MIT Housing notified me that I had wriggled my way to the front of the waiting list and snagged one room of a Sydney-Pacific duplex. Daniel, however, had heard nothing. Then, mere hours after we had put in motion the machinations necessary to potentially set Daniel up with individual living arrangements, MIT Housing emails him and gives him a room in a duplex, as well. Lovely! So we email Housing and ask if there’s some way to let us share a duplex, since we each have a room of one, anyway. The answer was “no”. On a whim, Daniel looked up the directory listing of his apartment-mate: room 838B. Curious, I looked up mine: room 840B. In one day, we had gone from not living in S-P, at all, to being in neighboring S-P duplexes. We will see if we can finagle our roomies to agree to some kind of swap, whereby Daniel and I manage to share a duplex again, despite outrageous odds. Oh, what a difference a day makes.

MIT Housing just gave me the email equivalent of the finger, informing me that they have no place for me this spring. Thus, I am currently a member of the impending-homeless, joining the ranks of the recently-evicted and foreclosed-homeowners. If you have any suggestions for apartments in the MIT area, please send them my way.

While losing the housing lottery would have been merely an Annoyance, I choose to escalate my anger level to Freaking Pissed, because I was supposed to have been guaranteed housing. I participated in Senior Segue, meaning that I lived in a graduate dorm my senior year in exchange for a year of guaranteed graduate housing. What they didn’t tell me is that, as a VI-A student, my semester at IBM would void this contract, because the year must be contiguous with my undergraduate career. When I brought this to the attention of housing, they said, “Oh, no, sorry you didn’t understand that. But enter the lottery, your chances should be very good.” Right.

So, to summarize: homeless, pissed.

‘Tis the season for applications. For me, this means graduate schools and fellowships. For others, it means medical schools and scholarships. My application load consists of four fellowships and six Ph.D. programs. I’ve discovered that some of these applications were designed by monkeys, which surprised me. I would have thought that these top-ten computer science schools would perhaps assign the task of designing the online applications to an animal with the cognitive capacity of Homo Erectus, at least. Instead, the process is so convoluted and poorly organized that I am actually leaning toward dropping one of the grad applications out of spite, and in order to save time and sanity.

Consider the following actual, but anonymized, example. You bookmark the online application page, believing that it will expedite the process. After completed the application, you begin to wonder why certain things were not mentioned. A Statement of Purpose, for example. But nowhere on the app, nor anywhere linked to from the app, does it mention such a thing. Suspicious, you search the university site, eventually discovering a list of additional requirements and components of the application process. This includes a form you must download, print, fill out, and mail in, despite the fact that all parts of it could easily have been included in the online application. Annoyed, you fill out this form. Where do you mail it? Well, according to the site, you consult the address listed on the form. According to the form, you “See enclosed Program Address Listing,” which, of course, doesn’t freaking exist. It was a pdf you downloaded, after all. So you scower the department site, eventually locating an address. All set, you think. Then, while working on another component of the application, you read that all parts are supposed to be sent to two locations, not just one. It doesn’t specify where those places are, instead referring you to the form you downloaded before, which refers once again to a non-existent document. You are now completely exhausted, confused, and miffed. Believing that you can somehow appease the monkeys responsible for this application, you stuff a banana into a giant manila envelope and send it to the address you found on the website. A few days later, a soggy envelope returns to your door, stamped with “Return to Sender: address does not exist.” Despondent, you curl into a fetal ball on your apartment floor, gently rocking back and forth while singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to yourself.

Of course, not everyone slips into a pseudo-autistic waking coma in the face of such a challenge. Fresh on the heels of her Glamour appearance, Yong-Hwa was recently named a Rhodes Scholar. This means she goes to study at Oxford for a few years. The scholarship places Y-H in distinguished company, including Bill Clinton, Wes Clark, Bill Bradley, and a couple of Supreme Court Justices. It’s very prestigious, and she is worthy of your praise. Oh, and she got into Johns Hopkins Medical. So basically, Y-H is kicking the all-singing all-dancing crap out life.

I intend to kick the all-singing all-dancing crap out of something, most likely a member of the primate world that has somehow found gainful employment with one of our nation’s most renowned technical schools.

I’ve said about as much as I can on this election. My position is clear, as are my reasons. Go out and vote for Kerry today, no matter what. If you are planning to vote for Bush, please talk to me first. Your decision is profoundly incorrect, and must be righted immediately. Your horrifying lack of judgment and distressing deficit of common sense cannot be allowed to affect my well-being. Let me help you; I demand it. If you are voting for Kerry, congratulations, you have chosen wisely. I will be watching impatiently tomorrow, with the knowledge that my head may very well explode if things go awry.

After lunch on Wednesday, when I pray we will be celebrating the victory of reason over bravado, I am flying to Chicago. This is the first leg of my journey, which includes a supercomputing conference in Pittsburgh, giving a talk at CMU, visiting Jamie, and schmoozing with a rather large number of professors at both UIUC and CMU. My official mission is to represent IBM at Supercomputing 2004, where we expect BlueGene will officially become the fastest supercomputer in the world. My not-so-super-secret mission is to meet with professors at these schools to help me decide where I might like to go for my Ph.D., what I might like to do my thesis on, and also to get my name out there, to be remembered when my application comes up for review.

From the Windy City, I’m driving 150 miles south to Urbana-Champaign, home of the University of Illinois. Luis and Karin, aka The Brazilians, a couple of former IBM interns who are students at UIUC, have kindly agreed to provide me with room in exchange for me providing them with some board (buying them dinner). I have plans to meet with a handful of profs, and it’s “Apple Days” so I might hit up a talk or two. On Saturday the 6th, I tip my hat in gratitude to my gracious hosts, and hop a plane to Pittsburgh.

Once in the Iron City, I’ll check into the Radisson at Green Tree. SC04 will already be underway, and I’ll probably join the festivities the following day, unless Jamie decides to kidnap me and take me to Allegheny. I will likely assist my group at the conference, in some capacity, while also attending talks. I’m meeting with some profs at CMU, in addition to giving a talk to a group called SQUALL, that focuses on scheduling-related jive.

At the end of the week, I fly back to the Big Apple. A couple of days later, I take the CS GRE exam. The end of that week brings with it the rather-important NSF fellowship deadline, a paper deadline, and a final report for my internship program. The fun never stops.

I won’t know my scores on the Analytical Writing section for a few weeks, but here’s an overly-exclamatory written reenactment of the two sections on which I already know my results, thanks to the mixed-blessing magic of computers.

Adam: Beware, Quantitative section, for I am a nerd. Your number-induced panic techniques do not work on me.”

Quantitative: So you think! Observe, a poorly-worded question with ambiguous pronoun reference.”

A: Argh! My linguistic sensibilities! No more Jedi mind tricks: time for burnination!

Q: Nooooo. [Gets raped by Adam.]

Verbal: You may have triumphed over the math section, but I shall make you ashamed to call English your first language!

A: Never! I may not know what any of those words mean, but you shall still meet with a trouncing!

V: Foolish mortal, I shall utilize obscure definitions of words you think you know, so as to trick you. You have no chance to survive! Make your time.

A: [Gets raped by verbal section.] Oh, good lord! My anus, it’s bleeding!

That’s more or less what happened; that is, less talking, more rape. I think the writing section was fine. I hope that will offset my disappointing score on the verbal section. My math score should be more important for most of the schools, anyway. Either way, it’s over. Now I’m going to find some food and try to relax. Despite popular belief, too much rape in one day can be a bad thing.