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Re: Academic advice...

From: Sacha Chua <>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 17:41:37 +0800

Replying to Charles Ballowe's message dated Wed, 1 May 2002 19:31:34 -0500:

> This isn't true at all. Freshmen might be discouraged, but not
> necessarily denied if they could prove themself. Starting my junior year I
> participated in a lab quite heavily (60-80 hour weeks during the summer). While my
> name didn't make any of the papers from the lab (I didn't actually write any
> of them, so that doesn't bother me) I would often help them poke holes in
> their arguements, or the arguements of others which they were refuting. The
> lab director served as a moderator for several conferences and would often
> hand papers to the people in the lab for critique.

<nod> Certainly being a freshman should never stop you from seeking out
and helping with projects. When I was in first year, I kept bugging my
CS teacher for extra projects to work on. That got me into several
advanced classes, and I ended up working on a course web page system
that my school still uses. (How nice!)

I've also been really lucky to find an internship position at a research
lab - ASTI, Advanced Science and Technology Institute. I'd been quite
vocal about the joys of Linux on the iPAQ in our local LUG mailing list,
and so when they asked if I'd like to work with the embedded systems
group, I jumped at the chance.

With summer winding to a close, I'm working on refining some possible
thesis projects I might pursue in my senior year (that's next year
already!). ASTI's been very supportive and will help me find the
equipment and resources I need, which means quite a bit to me because we
don't do wearable computing in our university. (Could make looking for a
thesis advisor difficult.)

Anyway, I need some advice. I'm coming from a straight CS background.
I haven't hacked around with hardware that much and I must confess I
find it a bit intimidating, but that's all right - it's fun to learn.
Any tips? I'm working on my iPAQ right now, as most of the wearable
systems I've seen on the Net are (a) expensive or (b) a little scary (I
don't yet have the hardware background to talk about such gizmos with
ease! =) ). Willing to learn, though! I'll be taking a computer
interfacing course as one of my electives (if the department offers it
this semester <hope>), but I know I have a great deal of catching up to
do. I'd like to go to graduate school later on so that I can do even
better research, so I need to get up to speed on all of this stuff.

Any tips for someone who's going to have to go for a crash course on
wearable computing more or less on her own?

Sacha 8)

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