My Year in Cities, 2011

Another year is ending, so it’s time for another summary of the year in travel. I spent 2011 mainly shuttling between Atlanta and the Pacific Northwest, with the big exception being a short trip to Ghana for research. This year’s travel resulted in 41,287 miles flown, about the same as last year.

I’m very much looking forward to spending my final semester of grad school in at Georgia Tech’s campus in Metz, France starting next week. I plan on traveling around Europe as much as possible while I’m there, and will hopefully do a better job of blogging too.

• Beaverton, OR*
• Seattle, WA*
• Atlanta, GA*
• Charlotte, NC
• Chapel Hill, NC
• Accra, Ghana
• Sunset Bay, OR
• Pickering, Canada
• Waterloo, Canada^
• Toronto, Canada^

One or more nights spent in each place, with the exception of day trips marked with a ^. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Previously: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

December 31, 2011 | no comments | tags: personal, travel

My Year in Cities, 2010

This year began with a flurry of travel for job interviews and grad school visits, and then was relatively quiet once I graduated and returned to Portland in the spring. In August, I moved to Atlanta to begin grad school, and finished the year off with some conference travel and tourism.

By the numbers, I didn’t fly nearly as many miles as I did last year, with a total of 40,340 miles flown. It was also the first year that I didn’t set foot in India since 2005. Even so, I can’t complain — it was a very enjoyable year.

• Beaverton, OR*
• Seattle, WA*
• Stanford, CA^*
• Mountain View, CA
• Savannah, GA
• Surrey, Canada
• Vancouver, Canada^
• Toronto, Canada
• Pickering, Canada
• Atlanta, GA*
• Corvallis, OR*
• Welches, OR
• Santa Clara, CA
• Santa Cruz, CA^
• London, England*
• Egham, England
• New York City, NY

One or more nights spent in each place, with the exception of day trips marked with a ^. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Previously: 2009, 2008, 2007

December 31, 2010 | 1 comment | tags: personal, travel

How to Write a Personal Statement for Grad School

This post is based on an answer I recently contributed to Quora. I’ve been wanting to write a comprehensive guide to computer science grad school admissions (like the ones by Mor Harchol-Balter or Justine Sherry) for a while now — rather than letting such a large task intimidate me any longer, perhaps it’ll actually happen if I post it in pieces.

By the time you begin applying to grad school, the single piece of your application that you have full control over is your statement of purpose. You can’t change the grades that are already on your transcript, and moreover, those only tell an admissions committee whether you’ve proven yourself to be a good student in the classroom. Similarly, your recommendation letters are another critical part of your application, but you probably won’t have much control over exactly what’s written in them.

Given this opportunity, don’t blow off the personal statement. Instead, use it to your advantage by covering important points that don’t surface elsewhere in your application. Here are the things I would include when applying to a research-oriented graduate program:

• A research statement.
  This should comprise the majority of your essay. The reader is likely concerned with your ability or potential to conduct research, so hopefully you already have a successful track record of research and related coursework. Discuss what research you’ve done and things that you might be interested in working on as a graduate student.
• Explain what motivates you to pursue graduate study.
  Are you looking for a career in academia or research? Did your previous research experience convince you to pursue a career in research? Do you want to teach as a professor? This is the place to say so.
• Convince the admissions committee that you’re qualified.
  You should have already done this while covering the above points, and your recommendation letters and CV serve this purpose as well. Even so, address any remaining red flags that might be on your application. For example, if you are switching fields, you might want to explain why, and if your background doesn’t have an obvious alignment with your new interest, discuss what makes you qualified to enter the program (eg. a non-technical person entering computer science would likely require remedial courses to make up for the lack of technical undergrad training).
• Explain why you’re applying to this particular school.
  You should explain why the school and program are a good match for you. What does this school offer you that others do not? How might the program help you fulfill your career goals? If there are individual professors whom you’re interested with working with, you might want to mention them and which projects of theirs interest you – this is a good way to nudge your application to their inbox even if they’re not on the admissions committee. Are there research papers from this school that have interested you? (If you put school-specific things in your essays, be careful to submit the right copy with each application!)

Another reminder that was mentioned on Quora is that this is very different from the essay you probably wrote for undergraduate admissions. A PhD admissions committee cares about your research abilities far more than it does about your quirky hobbies or childhood defining moments (unless they’re related to your research!). That said, it’s still used to evaluate your written communication skills, which are very important considering that your deliverables as a researcher will be in the form of publications, so take the time to exterminate any typos or grammatical errors from your essay.

Beyond this general advice, I highly recommend that you ask fellow students and friends in your discipline for their personal statements. If you’re working with students who are currently applying, volunteer to review each others’ drafts. In addition, get advice from people who are already graduate students — they were clearly successful at navigating the process you’re going through.

Good luck!

September 25, 2010 | 1 comment | tags: admissions, gradschool, howto, writing

A Lesson in Brevity

I recently sent Comcast an inquiry which said “I just signed up for service. What is my account number?” Their response, which follows, is so incredibly verbose that I feel compelled to share it with the world.

I must say, though, that my experience with Comcast in Atlanta has been nothing short of stellar. They installed service at my new apartment within a day, gave me a great deal, and I’m getting far more bandwidth than I was promised. No complaints so far, though I might have to send them a bill for the time it took me to read the email below.

read on…

August 29, 2010 | no comments | tags: comcast, customerservice

My Year in Cities, 2009

2009 is coming to a close, which means that it’s time for a recap of the year’s travels.

This was yet another year that brought many surprises. In January, I began working on MultiLearn as a capstone project in CSE 477. Thanks to very generous support from our advisors and sponsors, the project resulted in lots of travel. Combining those trips with a few others, I flew 79,661 miles this year, which falls well beyond my previous record from 2007.

Here are the cities I visited this year:

• Beaverton, OR*
• Seattle, WA*
• Eugene, OR*^
• Bangalore, India*
• Mysore, India^
• Ooty, India
• Coonoor, India^
• Mumbai, India
• Corvallis, OR^
• Doha, Qatar
• El Dorado Hills, CA
• Gurgaon, India*
• Udaipur, India
• Jaipur, India^
• Agra, India
• Berkeley, CA^
• Noida, India
• New Delhi, India

One or more nights spent in each place, with the exception of day trips marked with a ^. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Previously: 2008, 2007

December 30, 2009 | 7 comments | tags: personal, travel

Homelessness in America

Earlier this month, I had the incredibly humbling experience of attending a presentation by Mark Horvath, creator of invisiblepeople.tv, who has dedicated himself to sharing the stories of homeless people in America.

Like many others, my interaction with homeless people has generally consisted of me walking past them on the streets of supposedly thriving cities like Seattle and Portland. What’s more, most of us have adopted a negative stereotype towards the homeless, having dealt with relentless beggars, witnessed drug addicts, and read stories about people who make thousands by begging at highway onramps.

Mark turns that stereotype around by sharing just a few stories. In actuality, it turns out that the vast majority of the homeless are honest everyday people (many are children) who are trying to get out of difficult circumstances. Below are a couple videos he shared — hopefully they’ll be enlightening for you too.

If you’re like me, after watching these videos, you’ll be left wondering how you might help. I know of a couple options: If you want to help raise awareness, you can support Mark’s InvisiblePeopleTV RoadTrip, through which he’ll be sharing stories from across America over the next month. If you want to take a more direct approach, check out Change.org’s list of non-profits that are working for this cause.

Questions, comments, reactions, criticisms? Leave them all in the comments below.

June 30, 2009 | 1 comment | tags: america, homelessness, society

My Favorite Talks from Ignite Seattle 6

Over the past couple years, I’ve attended a few events hosted by various members of the Seattle tech community. Most of them are focused on running and promoting startup companies, but last month I had the chance to attend one that was purely centered around encouraging creative expression: Ignite Seattle.

If you aren’t familiar with Ignite, it’s a series of talks which are 5 minutes presentations, each with 20 auto-advancing slides. People are free to talk about whatever they want, since the goal is simply to share exciting and entertaining ideas with the community. Here’s a meta-talk by Scott Berkun about the format:

I could fill this space with more uninteresting text. Instead, I’m going to share some of the talks I enjoyed. Have fun watching, and hopefully you’ll quickly see why you should come along with me to the next Ignite, whenever that may be.

May 22, 2009 | 3 comments | tags: igniteseattle, seattle, speaking

The Case for Shared Computing

My elementary school’s computer lab probably had 50 computers, where we frequently played Oregon Trail and made flashy presentations in HyperStudio. My middle school had a lab of iMacs and rolling carts full of brand new iBooks. My high school had hundreds of PCs available for use in computer labs, classrooms, and even in the hallways. Needless to say, as I grew up, I always had individual access to computers and never needed to share.

In most of the world, this isn’t the norm.

Due to the fact that computers cost money, resource-constrained schools simply cannot afford to provide kids with access to one computer each. One approach to this issue is that of Nicholas Negroponte, which is to reduce the cost of computers to the point that One Laptop per Child is a feasible ideal.

Unfortunately, even if Negroponte achieves his goal of producing laptops at $100 each (they’re $200 today), maintenance expenses will bring the real cost of deploying these machines to over $250 per year. In India, where the government spends under $100 per student per year, deploying such technology is obviously an impossibility given these budget constraints.

Another approach is to split a single computer for simultaneous use by multiple people. Microsoft Research India has done much work in this field, through projects such as MultiPoint and Split-Screen — these projects connect multiple input devices to a single computer and thus allow people to have individual access to the machine, allowing for shared computing.

I’m currently working on a project for the Computing for the Developing World capstone course at UW with three other friends to explore the use of shared computing via multiple numeric keypads in improving primary education. Called MultiMath, our software provides arithmetic drills to four students at once, allowing for shared computer use, individualized attention, and adaptive questioning in competitive and collaborative environments.

This week, we are in Bangalore, running preliminary field tests at government schools in the area. We’ve learned a lot, but I’ll save that for another post.

MultiMath will be presented as a demo at ICTD 2009 in Doha, Qatar.
Interested in similar projects at UW? Check out Change.

March 26, 2009 | no comments | tags: computerscience, education, ictd, india, multimath, research, sharedcomputing

My Year in Cities, 2008

This year brought another study abroad trip and a road trip in Canada. With a total of 22,366 miles flown, a bit less than 2007, here are the cities where I spent my time this year.

• Beaverton, OR*
• Seattle, WA*
• Vancouver, Canada
• New Delhi, India
• Satoli, Uttarakhand, India*
• Corbett National Park, India
• Binsar, Uttarakhand, India
• Jageshwar, Uttarakhand, India
• Noida, India
• Agra, India
• Pickering, Canada*
• Montreal, Canada
• Quebec City, Canada

One or more nights spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Previously: My Year In Cities, 2007

December 31, 2008 | 2 comments | tags: personal, travel

Blame it on Dreamhost.

Wondering what happened to this website and many others? Here’s an excerpt from an email that Dreamhost just sent me:

Unfortunately, because of the file server problems, in order to get your
sites back up, you will now need to REUPLOAD all your content. We are
still trying to recover the data from peeler, but at this point it looks
like that process may take a few days, if it is even possible at all.

So, while I’m somewhat at fault for not doing my own offsite backups, Dreamhost has tremendously failed by:

1. not maintaining their servers appropriately
2. not having redundant backups
3. not communicating with their customers in a timely manner (it took over 30 hours of downtime before I was sent an email)
4. expecting customers to keep local backups of all of their content
5. spending their energy promoting unlimited bandwidth and disk space to new customers instead of fixing the above issues

I can only hope that they will redeem themselves with some extraordinary customer support over the next few days. I can still say that Dreamhost has provided excellent service for the most part, but it’s the times like these that can make us forget about all of that in an instant.

For more information about this particular issue, see this post at the Dreamhost Status Blog.

December 15, 2008 | 1 comment | tags: customerservice, frustration, meta, webhosting