MarkPNeyer.com

After several highly technical posts in a row I figure maybe I will give the people who read this thing a few details into what i’m doing with my life right now.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do this summer. I do know that I do not plan to spend it in cincinnati. I have applied to 8 ‘Research Experience for Undergraduate’ Programs, 2 research positions at national laboratories, and 5 internships. I won’t hear back from any of the research positions / REU’s until the end of march or beginning of April. Most likely I will take a research position, unless I get a google internship or another one decides that they want to pay me a lot of money, which I’ll need to support myself next year.

The Research Programs I have applied to are as follows:

Harvey Mudd College. A Computer Science REU in California. The neatest project at this one involves algorithms for optical networks. Being a physics major (and therefore having taken a course in optics) should give me a leg up on this one.

Texas A&M. A Computer Science REU. I don’t really know what projects they have here; the application process was simple so I figured why not.

Rice Quantum Institute. A physics REU in texas. If I get into the program I want the most, I’ll get to work on a molecular computer.

Hope College. A Computer Science REU in Michigan. There are two projects here that sounded appealing to me: one dealing with solutions to NP problems, and the other with software-based random number generators.

Lafayette College. A Math REU in Pennsylvania. The project that appeals to me from this REU involves graph theory.

Summer Math Institute at Cornell. This is not really a research position. I would take a real analysis course for about 30 hours a week, and then spend the rest of the time working on a graph theory problem.

University of South Carolina. After spending some time in North Carolina, I figured I’d apply to an REU in that part of the country because I thought it was very nice there. This is a Computer Science REU, and the focus is on information security. That would be great because I’m interested in an Information Security graduate program at Georgia Tech, and having this REU under my belt would be great.

Florida International University. I’d never heard of this school before, but their stipend is the largest one I’ve seen, and it’s in Miami Florida, which could be pretty awesome. The projects deal with ‘autonomic computing’ which seems to be programs that ‘run themselves.’ Whatever that means.

Sandia National Laboratories. I’m not really sure what I’d be doing here, but the place sounds pretty cool.

Los Alamos National Laboratories. If I do this one, I’ll be working on quantum computing. That could be cool.

Once I found out which places have accepted me, I’ll pick one and go there. If none of these places accept me, I’ve put in for internships at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and a defense contractor in Columbus called Aetion Technologies, where I have an interview in two weeks.

It should be a good summer

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.