The grad student. Lives off of the benificence of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and Giant Evil Corporations. Eats. Sleeps. Carouses with undergrads, pretending they still fit in with them. Carouses with professors, belittling undergrads and pretending to be adults. Produces papers that will never be read or used by anyone other than other grad students.

This is my life. I felt particularly like a grad student today, having spent 5 hours working on a project, then realizing that all my work was based on an incorrect assumption. At Apple, when that happened, it was still sort of okay, because whether or not I was right, I was still making $35/hour. Now it’s just like my time flushed down the toilet. Time that could have been spent playing Grand Theft Auto. Now, in some abstract sense, this was a character building experience. I know it. But damn. Talk about frustration.

First test of grad school: 76/100. Should be good enough. The class has about 9 people on a good day, and since I say things in class I’m not too terribly concerned. It was also my last test of the semester. The goals are certainly different now. Instead of just doing endless problem sets, taking tests, and getting grades, now I have to solve problems that haven’t been solved yet, that might not even have solutions, all while trying to meet some obscure goal of impressing a professor enough to take me in at the end of a year. I guess it’s a lot like trying to do well anywhere in the real world, but it’s the first time I’ve tried it so it still feels weird.

Tomorrow should be a stay-at-home-and-work day, but it’ll be chopped in half by an outing to SF to see my parents and their parents. I’ll try to bring stuff to read on the train so I don’t feel like the whole day is thrown off. I guess I should be more excited about seeing family, but I got to see my mom on Sunday, and my dad’s mother is not my most favorite person in the world. But it’s family, and certain things you should do for family. Sigh.

Doug’ll be coming into town again this weekend, which should be much fun–a rave has been scheduled for Saturday. Now I need to go learn what a subdivision surface is so I can teach it to my splines class next week… (wow, what a classically self-interested, content-free blog post)

Let’s see… what’s new? I’m still a grad student. Still loving it. Pinch me. Et cetera.

Friday, Stefani came over for dinner and drinking. We had steak and shrimp, yum. Introduced Stef to the Daily Show, tasted wine (in quantity), and generally had a great time. I headed to bed just as a screening of The Princess Bride was starting. My loss.

On Saturday I went to Ironworks (the Berkeley climbing gym) with another graphics grad student, Ryan, and an EE grad student named Dan. We’d gone a couple of times before, and I decided this time to restart my membership. It’s $60/mo, but they now seem to be offering ashtanga as part of their free yoga classes, and that plus climbing a couple of days a week is worth it, I think. I wasn’t quite at the top of my game, but Ryan and I took the lead climbing test and passed where we’d failed the time before. That alone made the trip worth it.

Today I worked for five or six hours trying to…well. I’ll just say it. I was trying to display gradient vectors in a discrete vector field on a cow. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. It kind of looks like he has a beard.

The second half of today was spent in a much-needed and very satisfying cleaning of our apartment. I just don’t have the spare time for it that I did when I worked at Apple. Man, this being a grad student in a paid program thing sure is rough.

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Comments

Ali — 2004-10-14 21:20:57

It must be more satisfying to have something cool looking at the end of the day; or at least more satisfying than the couple of pages of stats that I get.

Relaxing weekend - Star Wars: a New Hope on Friday night, Saturday night some great steaks, and Sunday I went golfing–yes golfing with Phil and a few of his friends. It was an interesting experience. I alternated hitting the ball with inexplicable accuracy and total incompetence. Still, it was fun–not a sport I’m going to take up any time soon, I don’t think. Too slow.

I spent most of the day on Saturday coding my first programming assignment for my splines class. It’s not very exciting, but it’s a start. I’ll probably post the code on overt once the due date is passed. The rest of Saturday I wrestled with Makefiles and dependencies trying to get SLIDE to build correctly on Mac OS X. Made quite a bit of progress, but I still have a ways to go.

I’m now reading Claude Shannon’s really old and really important paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” for my classic papers class. The man may have been a brilliant information theorist, but I can’t say much for his prose.

What a week.

On Wednesday I finally got to talk to James O’Brien, the last of the graphics profs at Berkeley who piqued my interest. It’s always a little weird going into these situations. I try to get out of the way quickly that I have an EE background, an EE degree, and that I was admitted as an EE student specializing in networks. Then I get to tell them about how now what I really want to do is graphics. You’d be surprised how well this usually turns out. I love Berkeley!

Anyway, James seemed leery but was willing to give me a shot. He set me up with a project that he described as “straight-forward.” Basically, I’m supposed to take this paper from this year’s SIGGRAPH and merge it with this paper. Clearly a piece of cake! Just extend Poisson-based triangular mesh editing to tetrahedral meshes, then project the tetrahedral mesh back onto a polygon soup to model deformations! What could be simpler?

I’m a little terrified, but also very excited. This is really a chance to sink my teeth into a project and impress someone. I’m not sure how it’ll go, but I’m definitely going to do my best to succeed. To restate what I’m actually doing in terms that mean something: Any random thing is hard to smoosh. But nice round things are easy to smoosh. So, take a random thing, cover it in goo so it’s round, smoosh the goo, then take it away to reveal the smooshed random thing. Simple. See?

Should be fun. In other news, I’m trying to teach myself MATLAB so that I can do a little project for my splines class, and I’m also still working on SLIDE for Carlo. I’m busy. It feels like my mind is really expanding again, for the first time since I left UT. I love it.

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Comments

leslie — 2004-09-24 09:28:16

I wanted him to squish peeps, but he said they were too easy. To really impress someone, you’ve got to squish tractors.

em — 2004-09-24 21:00:02

How Berkeley can you be? Did you find out today?

School really got cooking this past week with plenty o’ problem sets to be done. I really had forgotten just how much harder it was being a student than working my full-time job at Apple. I’m sure there are plenty of jobs out there that work you to death, but I realize now that I never worked as little as 40 hours a week as an undergrad, and I never worked more when I was at Apple. I’ve been basically lazy since I graduated, about 1.5 years ago. My brain is rusty, my work-ethic, everything.

But I’m glad my ass is getting kicked. That horrible, terminal feeling of sameness that pervaded my job just isn’t present. Every semester, reset to some new classes, a new schedule, new people. Clear progress toward a clear goal. I know I can’t go on like this forever, but I’ll take those five more years, thanks. Then maybe I’ll finally venture out into a world where the metrics of success aren’t so clear. But for now, I’m happy to settle for another problem set in the bank.

Next.

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Comments

cameron — 2004-09-13 09:00:27

my friend who just started at berkeley has had lots of away messages involving problem sets and beer. seems like a fun place to be a grad student. :)

amy — 2004-09-14 05:15:11

yep.. homework. up at 7 a.m. so i can finish plowing through this articles and send some semblance of an outline to my advisor before our meeting at 2. i’ve found that, like in the dorm, it’s good if you can turn it into some semblance of a social occasion. i’ve found that, unlike in the dorm, social occasions actually turn into social occasions, and no studying gets done. so. right. outlines. must stop browsing blogs.. cough

Ali — 2004-09-14 22:13:41

Told ya so….