timuralp

Is your advisor on the paper/going to the other conference? Maybe he/she can present it? I know that has happened before when students were not able to come to the conference.

One way to deal with it is to prepare for the conversations with the professors: skim their latest research papers/books/articles and get a sense of what they're working on, look at their students. Then make a list of questions about their research, the school, the department, their interaction with students. That'll carry you through those conversations. As far as social anxiety goes, though, I'm not sure what would be helpful advice. My approach is to slow down and take longer pauses, thinking of the responses and taking deep breaths. It gets better after a while. Good luck!

In computer science (in most subfields that I'm aware of), important work is published in conferences. Journals tend to be more for expanded versions of prior conference papers (and novel works are seldom submitted there). Most (probably all) conferences publish the proceedings and that counts as a publication you can put on the CV/resume/web page/whatever. This is one stark difference between computer science and most other fields.

That's part of the answer there. The other part is that being an academic involves a lot of long-term thinking and managing of students, but not as much actual research work (in a lot of cases). Industry labs are a little different, but some are also pretty similar. If research is not what you ultimately want to be doing, then what is the point of getting a degree that you won't actually use? You've kinda conflated two problems here. Compute science, as a field, tends to attract more introverted people. I bet the majority of them were introverted before entering grad school and CS programs don't push on them to get out of that comfort zone. You don't have to be that guy and it's not fair to claim that the degree itself is the reason for the personalities (I'm sure it's true in some cases though). There are much more social academics/grad students and maybe you just haven't run into them. In the end, it's your life and it's unfortunate that it seems people are trying to live some of their lives vicariously through you. Realize that you only have to answer to one person and that's you. Your family will still love you even if you *only* have an MS. Advanced degrees are not exactly a dime a dozen and it's about figuring out what you want to do with your life. One possibility you haven't mentioned (and one that I would strongly encourage) is to look into internships and to talk with your advisor. If you go off and work for a summer and realize that you love that environment -- great, problem solved. It's ok to leave with an MS even after 3rd, 4th, 5th year. You don't have to make the decision right this second. At the same time, you can also apply for jobs and just gauge what kinda offers you're getting. Applying doesn't mean committing to being hired.

Pick publications that are conducive to discussion (which implies you know something about the students' interests). An approach to ensure attendance is to provide food, however, at that point watch out for people showing up just for food and not contributing to the conversation. Anyway, it's hard but could be rewarding. Good luck!

I usually figure out the main areas of work in the particular subfield. Looking at the survey papers helps with that. Then I figure out the papers that originated that trend of research (in CS, a lot of topics are very new) and find the relevant papers that cited them. That gets me to the point where I can describe the basic idea and the subsequent improvements on it -- state of the art at the time of writing. Since there may be multiple different approaches to solving a single problem, I end up categorizing the papers by the approach taken. I don't read each paper, but enough to understand the major contributions of each one, so that I can describe in 1-2 sentences.

My first year I found a running buddy on craigslist and it worked out quite well. For one, I always felt guilty if I were either late or had to cancel a run and we ran about 3 times a week. It's tricky to find people that can match up nicely in pace, distance, etc, but it's worth a shot. If craigslist's too sketchy for you, try emailing some sort of a social list in your department or if there isn't one, it may be good to set one up.

I bought a $7 pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring

Similarly, some credit card companies (AmEx and Visa are two I know about for sure) include some insurance. Visa includes the Collision Damage Waiver and liability insurance is included in every rental.

I just looked it up: ssh can act as a SOCKS proxy. This is nice because you can forward all browser traffic through it and it will appear as if you're logged on from school. Here's how you can set it up on windows: http://www.techrepub...-on-windows/421 *nix/OS X is here: http://lifehacker.co...ssh-socks-proxy Firefox, Chrome, and IE, I believe, all support using a SOCKS proxy and you can point them to localhost. Other browsers probably do too. Edit: for more info on what it is/how it works/other options, man ssh on Linux gives a good (maybe too thorough) overview.

It's a trade-off between putting more load on the processor or more load on the network. You're probably right that since we have quite a few compute cycles that are not utilized and the network is commonly the bottleneck, it'd make sense to keep it enabled. Either way, it's not too hard to add -C wget can do quite a few powerful things (like submitting post requests, etc). Check out the man page for it if it seems necessary.

A few things: - try ssh -C for compression and see if the lag is better - you can download stuff with wget if you know the URL (it can follow redirects) You could also tunnel to an HTTP proxy if there is one setup at school. Edit: Looks like the last suggestion is moot.

Here's a sample of advice for prospective students looking to contact professors: 1. "I will not review any applications to Computer Science until you have been accepted into the program. At that point, we can explore common research interests". 2. "I only hire students who have been admitted to XXX. If you are interested in an RAship, you will first need to apply via XXX web site." Some professors will encourage students to actually contact them, but you should look at their pages, see what (if any) advice is there and proceed accordingly. The advice I have gotten from a number of faculty members is not to contact anyone until after the admission decision has been made. My contention is that students who are applying to graduate school rarely know the specific area they are interested in (they might know it broadly, like Systems or AI) and often switch advisors after being accepted. In that light, consider schools that fit a number of interests with a number of faculty working your general area of interest. Some typical responses: 1. "We’re always looking for good students and I encourage you to apply (although I should be clear that the admissions committee does their thing independent of me)" 2. "In general, we are always looking for great students in general (not necessarily specific to any projects), so I encourage you to consider applying to XXX" Of course, some professors would also be eager to discuss their research with you, but don't expect that to be the norm.

Also, AT&T u-verse is fiber to the neighborhood in most of Ann Arbor (I think), which is not as nice as fiber to premises, but the speeds are pretty nice and it is reliable. However, it is more expensive -- at least for the packages I've looked at. I have the Comcast economy packages (which they somehow don't offer anymore) and get their slowest Internet connection + expanded basic for $50/month. The 1.5 Mbps link is not great, but it works for the small stuff (including watching movies off Amazon prime) and I'm in the office often enough to make it tolerable.

Yeah, well, you know, that's, just, like, your opinion, man

One of the professors I had in undergrad wore an "I pwn n00bs" t-shirt to every exam. It was pretty entertaining.

Can you upload a screenshot of the menu when you press Fn+F5? Is there a way to turn it on after you press Fn+F5? I don't have the same model laptop. It would maybe make sense to either call customer service or post on one of the TP discussion forums.

Have you checked the switch that's on the front of the laptop? Could you please make sure it's set to "on" (i.e. laptop with waves coming out of it)? It should look like this:

Could be either one, but most likely hardware. The laptop should have an RF kill switch, which disables the antenna. From the Setup guide picture the switch is on the front (http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/42w9980.pdf).Then I guess there is also the fn+f5 combination which can be used to disable the card. I would make sure it's not disabled through either of these. You can check that the card is recognized and working properly in device manager. If it's not disabled, then maybe the card or the antennae were damaged. In the worst case, replacing a card with a different mini-PCI card is only $40-50. Replacing the antennae would be more tedious, but should also be pretty inexpensive. Lenovo has guides on how to take the laptop apart to do that. To access the card, very little need to removed, I think (only a few screws and a backplate).

Most of the time the requirement for TA a CS class is proficiency in the class (getting a grade > A- is one way to show it). The applications vary between schools. In some schools, the only part is selecting the classes one is eligible to TA (the grade requirement) and nothing else. Also, students with guaranteed funding who are not on RA will frequently get priority. The left overs are split somewhat randomly. One possibility is contacting the instructors for the classes ahead of time as they can request particular students to TA the class. If one has successfully filled a TA position for a class before, the chances improve, so you might be at some disadvantage. The software internships won't be of much help, as no one knows what exactly you've done and it certainly wasn't class curriculum material. It might be easiest to get a TA position after the first semester (especially, for the grad classes you take now), but definitely toss your name in the hat to start with.

This seems to be a relevant piece from WSJ. Personally, I seldom use dear and try to avoid it as much as possible and stick with Professor X or if I've had any contact whatsoever with the person, I start with Hi or some other form of greeting. Granted, I don't think this is a popular thing to do

I have not tested this firsthand, but it appears there are plugins for both for LibreOffice. The fork should be pretty much similar (almost identical?) to OpenOffice to start with, but I would think there will be more divergence over time with OpenOffice becoming defunct.

Here more than 3 is strongly discouraged. It may be program specific, but watch out for project classes. Some are notoriously time consuming (think working 20-30 hour weeks on a project just for one class for the duration of the semester). With the right combination of classes it can be doable, but 3 unrelated projects could be quite challenging. The undegrad systems and architecture classes are sometimes even worse than grad in terms of workload. Check what each class entails. It might give you a good idea of what you're in for.

Just for balance, my Dell laptop has been running with no issues since I got it in the fall of 2006. I guess your mileage may vary. Dell seems to be a touchy topic, so I won't say more about it. I would second Asus. They're awesome. I did have a weird issue where the heat sink actually detached itself from the GPU (I really don't know how) and I had to reapply thermal paste and re-tighten it. That wasn't huge deal. I'm willing to bet that's not a regular occurrence with them. Or even buy stuff online. NewEgg + Amazon are great for stuff like that. The box I recently built ran ~$300 (without a monitor -- used the TV for that).

You mean this? So, let me get this straight, only an iPhone does not display the site properly? No Android phones would do this? Or OpenMoko phones? or RIM phones? And you've definitely verified this, right? Thank god no one asked you to do that.