MarkPNeyer.com

This past weekend, I went to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois to visit the University of Illinois and see if I want get a Ph.D. in Computer Science there. Afterwards, I drove up to Chicago to see Jeremy; Bob and Shaan as well as some of the UC Biomedical Engineering kids happened to be there on account of a conference. There’s just no escaping those guys.

I liked Illinois. The buildings were very sharp, and the professors and students that I met were very friendly. I didn’t get a ‘this is the place!’ feeling like I did at Xavier, but I liked it and wouldn’t mind spending a couple of years there. I did think it was a bit cold, though – that thinking renewed my interest in schools like Georgia Tech, UNC, and perhaps Rice or UTA. I need to pick some schools that are ‘lower’ on the rung in case I don’t get into the top ranked schools that keep catching my fancy.

While I was in chicago, I realized how much travelling I’ve done recently. In the past year, I’ve been to:

Salt Lake City, Utah
Ralgeigh, North Carolina
New York City, New York,
St. Louis, Missouri
Columbia, Missouri
Kansas City Missouri
Abliene, Kansas
Denver, Colorado
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona
Los Angeles, California
San Diego, California
San Francisco, California,
Reno, Nevada

I’m probably going to Seattle in a few months, and more likely than not, I’ll be visiting some other graduate progams this spring. I find that I really enjoy travelling.

Grad School applications are taking up a lot of my time, but I’m still finding (perhaps moreso than I should be) time to have fun. I know I’ve stressed out now, on account of being so busy, but I’m going to miss it when it’s gone.

It’s me!! Solving polynomial equations mod composites using the chinese remainder theorem just isn’t my idea of fun.

So I took this quiz that I saw in Rebecca’s LiveJournal.

You Are a Boston Terrier Puppy

Aggressive, wild, and rambunctious. Deep down, you’re just a cuddle monster.

I do say, that dapper fellow bears quite a resemblance to yours truly.

I find that now that I live near campus with friends, I am nowhere near as good at managing my time. I was telling myself earlier tonight that I needed to get better at time management, when Tim came in my room and told me we were going to Arthur’s for Burger Madness. Hooray! I debated it for a bit but figured I could use a break. You can always us a break.

I met Rebecca, who is Anneliese’s best friend from high school, at the WEBN fireworks. She seemed amusing to talk to, and after talking to her for a couple of weeks online, I went to go see her at Miami. I really enjoy spending time with her, and find that our presonalities mesh very well. I never really thought how much I’d enjoy a girl who only gets and enjoys my bizzare sense of humor, but has a smiliarly odd sense herself.

I got my GRE scores back today. I got perfect scores on 2 of the 3 tests. Not bad, I suppose. It’s too bad that ETS are a buch of bastards who want to (and probably are) make a ton of money. They’ll send your scores to 4 schools for free, but after that, you’ve got to pay $15 a pop. I plan to apply to a lot of schools, too. *looks sadly in the wallet.*

I am driving up to illinois this weekend, to see UIUC’s campus. The professors there have been very friendly with me, and they seem like cool dudes. I hope I like it there – I’d like to have one place that I really want to go. I will check out Carnegie Mellon later this year, I think.

I am starting my first ‘real’ project at work – taking code written by some dude in china for a server and adding the capabilities in the client. I’ll be using C++, TCP/IP, XML, SQL, and AML, which is the company’s proprietary language. As far as I can tell, it’s not much different from LISP. The fun thing about CS is that they are a ton of acronyms. :-p

Time for more homework ….