Let me join the fray in wishing everyone a Merry Christmas!It was a surprisingly busy semester for me, with job interviews and journal work taking up most of the first half of the semester, and exams (and studying) taking up the latter part. It was a good semester on the whole, but I’m glad to be done.I’m back in Raleigh now. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone over the break and hitting up Mac’s New Years Party!
Last week, Ben and I took a road trip up to New York City. It was awesome. I wanted to go up to visit the schools — Columbia and NYU — but I’ve also wanted to go up and see Chethan for a while now.
I don’t really have too much to say about the trip that Chethan didn’t already cover. Suffice to say that we had a lot of fun together, and C’s friends seem like a fun bunch. It was great to hang out and just chill, and since none of us was that serious about doing the tourist circuit, we were able to relax and have fun. I mainly enjoy experiencing places as most people would — just walking around the town, riding the subway, eating at the corner pizza place, and so on — so this trip did not disappoint. Make no mistake though, Chethan’s room is tiny, as it most housing in Manhattan.
As for my school visits, I was not disappointed. I spent about a half day at Columbia, toured their beautiful campus, toured around the law school (which is outside the campus), and sat in on a class. The self-tour was a bit limited, and I left feeling the place was a lot smaller that it probably really is. The class discussion was a lot more interesting and animated than at Carolina; the students seemed to take things seriously, but still had time to crack jokes with the prof. No socratic method — people were volunteering answers, for the most part.
I spent a whole day at NYU at an admitted students’ day. They had events planned for us all day. I sat in on another class there and got the same basic outlook as the class at Columbia — the students were interested, and the atmosphere was laid back. I met a lot of potential fellow classmates as well. I probably got a much better view of NYU because it was an organized event, but I really liked the vibe, both of the school, and the Greenwich Village area in general.
Right now I’m leaning towards NYU (the fact that other schools haven’t gotten back to me makes this a lot easier to say…) The general idea I get both from my visits and from talking to people involved in law is that NYU, as the underdog, is seriously committed to continuously improving. That’s not to say that a school like Columbia isn’t top notch, but Columbia has a name and a prestige that has a long Ivy pedigree, and I feel like that leads to a slightly different attitude. That aside, NYU has a focus and a strong reputation for public interest, and that’s the area I’m seriously looking towards. The fact that I loved Greenwich Village doesn’t hurt. Until I send my deposit in though, everything is up in the air.
I’ll post some pictures soon. I didn’t take too many though, so don’t get too excited.
Many of you know that I had some hiccups with the US mail recently — I was expecting a letter in the mail and it never arrived. I spoke to someone on Friday who promised to resend the letter, this time over UPS with 2-day shipping. So I call home today expecting to hear that my package had arrived, and my parents inform me that not only do I have a letter delivered by UPS, but I also have a very similar package from regular US mail. The contents? My original letter, dated March 1.
Classic.
Oh well. I can’t complain too much. I got into NYU — twice.
Update:
So I lied. I went home yesterday and looked the mail myself. The UPS letter, which my parents opened for me, had a copy of the original letter (with a giant COPY stamp on it). The other letter was a different mailing that happened to arrive on the same day. Still. Odd coincidence, but not as good of a story.
Well, it looks like I haven’t written for almost 4 months. Where have I been? I got sidetracked. Also, I took a few trips (one to California, where I visited Martin at Stanford and attended a conference in San Jose, and another trip to Boston, where I visited Mayank and attended a conference with Mark about the GPL at MIT). Most recently, I’ve been focusing on applying to law school.
Writing a personal statement is an excruciating affair. It’s 2 to 3 pages about yourself, and it has to be pretty close to perfect. I had trouble figuring out what to write about, and then once I did I spent another couple weeks of nonstop editing to get it to flow well. Anyway, about $600 later, I’ve sent almost everything in. Now I just have to wait. I’ll hear back in April.
What else have I been up to? Well, a couple of weeks ago, I went to the Emerging Issues Forum. This is a conference run by a group out of NCSU that is chaired by Former Governor Jim Hunt. The Forum is a place to discuss issues of special importance to North Carolina.
This year’s topic was “Financing the Future”, essentially, tax and revenue planning for the future. I decided to go because I thought the list of speakers was amazing: people like Paul Krugman, Bill Richardson, Mark Warner, Steve Forbes, and so on. What I didn’t think about was what the attendees would be like. It was definitely a who’s-who of NC politics and business interests. The talks were very interesting. I took copious notes. I tend to think about these issues on a more national scale, and it was enlightening to hear what people at the local level had to say.
I’ve waited so long to write about it that I don’t have anything really interesting to say, so I’ll just leave it at that.
One topic that’s been in my mind for a couple years now has been that of systems, or more specifically, complex systems (though I would adhere to a definition that falls kind of in between a plain and a complex system, I suppose). I won’t bother defining what systems are, since Wikipedia does a good enough job of it.
My favorite engineering courses at NCSU were those that involved systems: linear systems, linear algebra, control, and so on. The general properties of systems have always astounded me. Unpredicted organization and effects seem to fall out of systems. Unconnected parts fall into a rhythm. Changes in one part of a system cause effects in completely unrelated areas.
You can’t get away from them. At work, I feel like our project, OpenSeminar has some systematic features to it. Martin and I will make changes, and invariably, there will be uncharted effects in all kinds of places. Those of you who have worked with complex software know what I mean when I say that sometimes, you just can’t tell why a bug appeared where it didn’t exist days ago, or why one change in an unconnected spot makes those things go away. Our network, as we noted today among many, seems to have a life of itself — it’s even more finnicky and more unpredictable than our software. Just another complex system at play.
The political world is another system that really interests me. It relies on so many inputs and outputs. The great thing about trying to understand politics is that you also have to study the underlying population and culture. It becomes a giant anthropological study — more systems to look at.
All the people who worked on senior design with me know that our device took on a life of its own. Our board had 8 variable resistors hooked up to four separate circuits, and changing one resistor made the whole system react differently. It took a long time to get a hang of how that worked.
I could go on forever, I suppose. There are so many neat systems out there. What’s my point? I guess it’s just to point out how cool systems are. I think that research into how unrelated systems work in similar ways needs to continue. I think that we’ll break a lot of ground in the next 10-15 years, and I’m curious to see where it will lead us.