I have stopped dreaming and have started living my dreams!
It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting!
When you want to achieve something the entire universe conspires and helps you achieve it...
So true!
Posted in
life
| 4
comments
Don’t think I’ve mentioned here before that I am working for VMware as a part time intern this semester. Though
As almost every desi in the CS dept is graduating in Dec and has fewer courses this semester, first few weeks into the semester were pure fun! Fooseball, late night pool, movies, parties…things like these didn’t use to happen at
People have become so innovative that now we have a Google calendar shared among all desis called ‘Crisis buster calendar’. It contains an entry for every event on the campus where there is a slightest chance of getting free food! This scheme is working great so far :) In addition to that there were events like WSE fall picnic, Fall fest too.
The entire desi junta also went to a night tour of
Then there was the fresher’s night. I will quote a mail on JHU yahoo group regarding the event. “This was one of the best fresher's night ever. You guys surpassed all expectations with your enthusiasm and by the quality of the performances. The Bhangra, the dance, the solo performances, the 'quack-quack' skit (was it a hen or was it a duck) were all amazing. Three cheers to the DJ, the sound guys, organizers and the food committee!”
Now there is a reason to look forward to the Diwali party.
As the semester is taking speed I have realized that I have started missing
Posted in
grad life,
JHU
| 4
comments
On September 19th, I attended a career night organized by Alumni association of Whiting school of engineering at JHU. It was a nice opportunity to get tips from alumni having a variety of experiences ranging from building weapons of mass destruction to managing multi billion dollar finance firms. In the end of their presentation they had students to send resumes for review so that newbies will get to know weaknesses in their resume before they start flooding mailboxes of recruiters all over the place :)
I sent mine and was surprised to get a call one fine day that the alumni who reviewed mine wanted to meet me in person. He was going to do a presentation at
After the talk we had a chat for 20 minutes about my short time and long term goals and what my plans are to achieve them. I also asked about whether I should go for a MBA as I think that’s a good way to get VC funding whenever I decide to take the plunge and start on my own. (Believe me it is going to happen!) Though this is a very long term plan it doesn't hurt to start early. He was very nice and supportive and we exchanged good byes with his comment “In the worst case you will do exceptionally well!”
Posted in
grad life
| 0
comments
I had written a blog before regarding my independent study in I/O virtualization so thought of adding a finale.
To give you a background, I was talking to Prof. Randal Burns regarding doing some research in I/O virtualization in the beginning of Spring semester. Randal told me that I can work on any idea that I find interesting. By then I had already accepted VMware’s offer for the summer internship so I decided to talk to them to see if they had anything research-y that I could work on. My VMware manager and mentor were very approachable and as per their suggestion I decided to work on ‘Storage I/O load balancing algorithms’ as my independent study topic. Randal was fine with this idea. Till the end of spring semester I was still in the reading phase to figure out the depth and breadth of the problem. At JHU, if you start an independent study in Spring then you can extend it till the end of Oct if your adviser is fine with that. Till I joined VMware, I had no idea whether I will be working on the same stuff. Fortunately it turned out that it is going to be my summer internship project. I won’t go into details of what we achieved due to Intellectual Property issues but to sum up my experience I will say my internship was “any systems programmer’s dream job”. My talk at VMware on the same topic was also very well received.
After coming back to Hopkins I went to Randal to give him an update about my independent study work. I thought I will have to do some more work before writing the report. But I was surprised to see the outcome of the meeting!
R: “It must be a busy summer!”
R: “So did you work on $$$$$$ worth storage arrays?”
R: “So how do you plan to use this work?
Me: (worried)What do you mean?
R: “Do you want to use this as a masters thesis or a project?”
Me: (couldn't believe my ears!)“Do you think I can use this as a thesis?”
R: “Sure…
R: "...As far as an independent study is concerned just submit the report and you're good to go..."
R: “If I were to review this paper for FAST…”
:)
In the words of my mentor, “Good to see that your independent study bird fell with this stone! “
So officially I just need two more courses to graduate!
Posted in
grad life,
vmware
| 2
comments
I uploaded my website yesterday.
It took longer than expected (I spent significant amount of time for two days) and basically taught me the importance of having the right tools! With a little bit of googling I found a nice CSS on oswd.org. (Mine is created by Arcsin. Good job dude! ) Since I had already decided what stuff to put on the website the pages were already in place. So far so good… My laptop's Adobe dreamweaver trial version had expired and MS office 2003 did not have FrontPage. Those were the only two visual editors for HTML that I knew. Since I needed an alternative I tried Nvu, CoffeeCup editor and HTML Kit. Nvu is at least tolerable. In the end I had to copy my stuff to one of the lab machines in JHU to use FrontPage to fix some annoying image linking issues.
Posted in
life
| 0
comments
