It's been just over 3 weeks since my last update and I've evidently failed to blog weekly as promised. It's hard to believe October is almost over. Fall (or Autumn) is definitely here now - leaves are falling and there are, on average, fewer hours of sunlight each day. The cold is sweeping in. As we started October the Berkeley 'Indian summer' carried over to give us a HOT first few days. This didn't persist much beyond the first weekend though and it quickly moved into 'hoody' weather.
Soon after that, I managed to accidentally smash my bedroom window while fitting my new amplifier and the nights became much cooler. This led to some very chilly nights, which became better when Ryan used his superior duct tape to actually seal the window with cardboard (versus just slotting it in - which was my approach).
Broken glass aside, it's been a monumentally busy month. The day after my last update, I went sea kayaking on the bay with Cal Adventures, the outdoor centre that is run by (affiliated with?) the university. This was a one day introductory course that allows me now to go out on the bay alone (within line of sight of the centre). While the pace of the course was a little slow for my liking, we were extremely lucky to catch such beautiful weather and being out on the bay was a peaceful experience that helped mitigate some of the stress of our second Advanced Robotics assignment.
The calm didn't last for long though because I was soon onto an assignment for Computer Vision. Once this was completed, I had an Advanced Robotics assignment that was due in a week. It had come out late beacuse our Professor had recently changed the questions and had been trying to solve them himself. This took longer than expected...perhaps an ominous sign. Logistics made it impossible to heed his advice that we start immediately and so I tried my best to do it in a week. This proved to be difficult - in the end taking 9 days (using all of my remaining late days).
During those 9 days, I put in about 50 hours of work, getting stuck on the last part of the first question for three days. Despite going to see our teaching assistant three times about it, I got no further. Bad strategy which resulted in me turning in the assignment 70% complete. Whoops. Looks like trying to juggle the job hunt with a graduate degree at Berkeley is a difficult optimisation problem!
This past week has been a bit of a rollercoaster for a number of reasons. After receiving one job offer, the other employers are reacting much more quickly and this next week I have 6 interviews planned. I'm wishing I hadn't scheduled my Google phone screen first - now that I've had numerous telephone screens, I might have screwed that one up much less badly.
A few weeks ago a professor sent around a request for volunteers to pick up/drop author Neal Stephenson from/to the airport. He came to a panel on campus, vaguely entitled 'On The Future: Beyond Computing'. Other members of the panel included Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google and Jaron Lanier, author and coiner of the term 'virtual reality'. I capitalised on my free Zipcar credit and replied - a few hours after the email was sent around. It looks like my response time was favourable and I was tasked with dropping him off to Oakland airport on the day after the talk. Equally as exciting, Professor Katz invited me to dinner with the panelists afterwards. (Googling Professor Katz revealed him to be one of the creators of RAID. Incredible. I was very tempted to ask him if he knew where my data all went, that one time...)
This was an interesting experience, being both simultaneously over and underwhelming for reasons best explained in person. I'll post a separate note with my takeaways from my conversation with Neal Stephenson. Still, I was buzzing with excitement for a good two days after that. What struck me as most admirable was how normal these tremendously acclaimed people were. I'd always imagined that reaching their heights of 'notoriety' came with some ego inflation but meeting these three demonstrated how untrue that assumption was.
The next day we had the interview at the culmination of our application to Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad class. As I mentioned previously, this was one of the classes that helped me decide to come here and I was quite looking forward to it. The interview itself was short - which indicated that either we had enough information on our application or that they had already made up their mind. We'd put a lot of effort into our application, spending quite a bit of effort researching the space around our proposed 'startup' (similar to my capstone project). They asked questions around our idea and around our team for a total of 5 minutes before we were let free.
A double gin and tonic (or club soda, tonic is expensive here) plus 8.95 hours of sleep later, I woke up to a depressing rejection email from the teaching assistant for the class. We've yet to receive feedback as to our rejection which is strange, because they're normally very quick to queries. The silver lining is that I'll now have significantly more time next semester to sleep, exercise and submit applications for accelerators.
The last couple of days have been moderately alcoholic; after the last few weeks, I was desperate for some mindless social interaction. Yesterday we had our MEng Halloween party and it occurred to me that the primary reason people hold Halloween parties as adults here is to take photos. Despite buying $10 worth of cardboard sheets, some cyan spray paint and duct tape, I ran out of time and wasn't able to recreate a costume based on the Hype Dark robot. One day.
This coming 12 days is going to be the toughest of the semester yet. In addition to the 6 interviews, I have a couple of social engagements (including seeing LTJ Bukem and Bachelors of Science live!), two homework assignments and a midterm to prepare for. On the other hand, once this fortnight is over - life will become a lot easier.
