Loading ...Posts filed under ‘school n work’
interesting combination
March 4th, 2004
i was picking up an application form from a building in my university. while waiting for the lady to get me the form, i saw this basket of candies sitting in the waiting room. i was planning to take some but then i saw mixed with them were condoms. i just wasn’t sure any more. what a combination huh? i guess condoms is not much different from candies in college. looking at the health poll at my school just makes me sick.
Poll #3 Results: How many sexual partners have you had?
11 or more: 16%
….
Whatever happened to learning in college?
personal statement
March 3rd, 2004
more to what i wrote previously (which i find now extremely boring), i’m searching for advice on how to write a good personal statement for my graduate school application. some tips on this page just make me laugh so hard. i can not believe that apparently people have made the mistakes before.
* DO NOT makes misteaks in grammer, speling: or puncuation; (see how bad it looks).
* Conform to the required structural specifications (e.g., 1 page, single spaced). If no specifications are given, no more than 1 single-spaced page or 2 double-spaced pages is a good rule.
* Do not use cute fonts or colored paper.
* Show individuality without being “odd.”
* Avoid discussing personal problems, such as a recent nervous breakdown.
* Avoid clichés such as “I want to help people” or “I want to make the world a better place.” Try to be down to earth.
* Be straightforward and honest. If you have done your homework, then you honestly are applying to the schools that would serve you best.
* Tone: Write with confidence but not arrogance. Let the faculty know that you are enthusiastic, determined, and ready for graduate school. Avoid writing the statement like you know everything you need to know, and the school would be lucky to have you.
* Use active verbs to describe your experiences.
* Specificity: Demonstrate that you actively researched the school to which you are applying (e.g., type of program, emphasis on research vs. practice, general research area of faculty members, etc.) and that it would suit your goals. However, being too specific (identifying the precise type of research you want to conduct with a specific faculty member) may narrow your options and decrease you chances of being accepted.
* Proofread it, have a trusted friend or family member proofread it, take it to a writing lab on campus, and then have a faculty member read it. Then proofread it again.
wacky professor
January 23rd, 2004
there’s a lot more to say about this wacky visiting asso. professor from HongKong. he teaches my asian humanities: china class. he believes in too many superstitions (fengshui, yijing etc). for example, he puts a budda on his office window so the female ghosts won’t come and corrupt him (since he’s a scholar).
he’s also extremely obsessed with powerpoint. he was too astonished to find out that our classroom does not have a computer. he said, without powerpoint, you have no power and no point. *dies*
expensive book
January 20th, 2004
can you believe this small 500 page book costs $100 - well that is the book i need to buy for my required abstract algebra course for my math major. good thing i ordered the cheapest used one from amazon. with shipping it’s $72, still cheaper than the used book price at my university book store (without tax either). after i get that one, i will return the one i purchased today at school.
while i was waiting for another class, i read the first chapter of that book and actually found a couple of examples extremely amusing. *geek alert*
basically the first chapter is validating why testing can not prove math. so they gave an example. it’s a call Pell’s equation - m^2 = p*n^2+1, where p is a prime and there is a way of calculating all possible solutions of it. A spectacular example of Pell’s equation involves the prime p = 1,000,099; the smallest n for which 1,000,099n^2+1 is a perfect square has 1116 digits. THAT IS CRAZY. it’s saying you can test and test, even if for ages you can not find a contradiction to a statement, that still proves nothing. coz you never know when a contradition will occur. in that particular example the first contradiction comes when a number has 1116 digits.
another example: Gold-bach’s conjecture: every even number m >= 4 is a sum of two primes. No one has ever found a counterexample to Gold-bach’s conjecture, but neither has anyone ever proved it. at present, the conjecture has been verified for all even numbers m < 10^13 by H.J.J. te Riele and J.-M. Deshouillers. It has been proved by J.-R. Chen that every sufficiently large even number m can be written as p + q, where p is prime and q is "almost" a prime; that is, q is either a prime or a product of two primes. Even with all of this positive evidence, however, no mathematician will say that Gold-bach's conjecture must, therefore, be true for all even m.
dig into COM
January 12th, 2004
so my research project for the next semester has started early. i had a couple of options. i chose to learn c# and help building this IE addtion component like google toolbar for a specialized search engine for my professor. he warned me it’s gonna be hard. yes it will be challenging since i have very little experience programming in windows environment. but i do want to learn. he told me to start with this tutorial. right now i haven’t been able to compile the source code. i’m not familiar with visual studio or COM. it will be a very enjoyable class if there’s an offer. i’m a horrible self learner. i’d prefer lectures 100 times over reading a textbook. hrm but yea if i do plan going to grad school, i’d better overcome that. btw, i looked over GRE last week. not pretty. it’s just like SAT only tougher. good thing i’m not really shooting for a very high score if i plan to stay in iowa. the registration fee hurts tho: $113 per test.
grades are out
January 7th, 2004
WEB PROGRAMMING A
ADV INFO/KNWLDG A
CIV OF ASIA: CHINA A
PROGRAM LANG CONCEP A-
Hrs GPA
12 3.92
so i guess i got A- in that class i hate. not that i hate the material. i just hate the grading. oh whatever, it could have been worse. at least my over all GPA is still 3.86. my high standards pretty much had gone down by this point in college. around 3.86 is fine with me XP
last final
December 19th, 2003
delightful - i finished my last 7:30am final. i was struggling with one of the haskell problem on the exam but i think i nailed it at the end. 10 minutes before the end of the exam. the exam is two hour long. i finished everything except problem 4 by 8:30am. then i dived into problem 4. for 40 minutes i’ve tried many different approaches and finally i got it. however redundant it could be, at least i believe it solves the problem correctly.
i also got my TA’s email telling me i scored 100/100 on the last homework. i haven’t been happy with the class if you read my complaints here and here but maybe i will end up with an A coz i’ve been hearing a lot of “i didn’t study” “i have no idea what i’m doing” kinda comments from my classmates before the exam. at least i do know what i am doing even if i will never touch haskell or prolog again.
grad research
September 24th, 2003
school has been going great. in our perl class, we soon will be finishing the lessons on perl programming and dive into a research for the rest of the semester. i can basically do anything internet related research using perl. one of my ideas my professor liked is trying to research what kind of blog entries on personal blogs attract comments. for this, i will need quite some data to work with. i emailed livejournal if they’d give me a stats of the top 500 most commented entries. it seems they don’t have that available and is unwilling to provide any help *shurg* i guess i will just have to build my own survey for all people who own a personal blog 
something pretty interesting i learned today from my professor. of course you might already know this. i’ve just been doing something quite dumb this whole time.
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what’s up with the fees?
September 16th, 2003
this is really pissing me off. did i ever pay attention or does it seem only starting this year UI started to charge ridiculous fees like:
Computer Fee $94.00
Student Activities Fee $19.50
Student Services Fee $25.50
Student Union Fee $42.50
Building Fee $59.50
Student Health Fees $84.50
the first four are supported by this and the last one is even better. What does my “health fee” pay for?
i don’t use any of these services except computers. what makes them mandatory?! i mean doesn’t it make more sense that if you only pay for health care fees when you GET SICK? wtf….arg
oh yea, this is really gross How many sexual partners have you had? - 11 or more 16% *puke*
grad school appointment
September 12th, 2003
i talked to my teacher for perl and visual basic about me going to grad school today. he’s really nice and has given me many pointers to fields that might interest me. he said i don’t necessarily have to get a Ph.D in computer science. if i’m interested in human computer interaction, search engines, i should consider going to the business school here in UI, get a Ph.D in MIS because the MIS study here is very technical orietated. he even gave me a research journal to read. he said it’s the journal we in the perl programming class will later discuss but since i am always two steps ahead, he will let me read it now. LOL i don’t know why i give him that impression. yesterday he was teasing me in the class. while he was teaching with his labtop on the overhead, he browsed to a certain place on his hard drive and said “i want to show you something weird. since the beginning of the semester, Ying has sent me a thousand emails and i actually gave her her own folder.” there he showed a folder name “Ying Zhang” with some of the files i sent him. OMG LOL.. i was embarrassed but it was funny. everyone laughed. i guess if i do apply for the business school here and end up working with him, it won’t be too bad XP
