User group presentation II

The experience

As for the presentation itself, I think it went reasonably well. There were some technical difficulties, which have are on tape for all of eternity. I had about 30 minutes allotted, so it was basically just me talking at the audience and hoping it stuck. Speaking of which, it was a smaller group than normal, because PyCon Canada was at the same time. I think there was a decent mix of experience levels - some very experienced, and at least two early year undergrads.

I would have liked to interact with them a bit more, take more questions about what was or wasn’t making sense - but that’s what tutorials are for. I didn’t spend a lot of time going over the code, but much like the professors who page through slides faster than you can take notes, I knew they could look up the slides later. And I have links to all the stuff that I read to learn about the topic, so there’s that too. I included a couple of plugs for Matt’s book, for obvious reasons. If anything, the best thing I could do is convince them to read that.

Hmm, what else. One person asked me about how I did the presentation in Emacs - I’ll talk more about that in another post. A professor in the computer science department at UofA congratulated me on doing it in the first place, and we chatted about his experience doing live coding. I saw him at a PhD thesis presentation later in the week - hilariously enough, he has either the same laptop as I do (the tablet version, too) or the model from the year prior. I’ll probably write up some notes about that presentation, but, that’s a tale for another time.

I thought the meeting started at 6pm, but it was actually 6:30. On the one hand, that gave me enough time to eat at the pub next door. On the other hand, that gave me just enough time to eat at the pub next door. I walked in, asked if they could prepare anything in 15 minutes, the waitress said yes, and it turned out she was right. During a brief moment of sanity, I started by eating the fries first, but it didn’t last - I tried to eat the burger as fast as possible, and in the process, thoroughly burned most of my mouth. I didn’t feel it until afterwards, but, when I did - ow :(

I got really stuffed up for the next few days, which was really annoying. I figure it was some sort of ineffective response to my burned mouth, but who knows. It kept me from talking to the CS professor when I saw him again, because I didn’t want to make anyone sick. I’m not even sure I was sick, except for one day where I felt terrible. Anyway, I’m sure you don’t care about my suffering. I just wanted to write it down while I still remember.

Reflecting on the visit pt 1

Surely you’re asking yourself: how was your girlfriend’s visit, Matt? Well, I’ve got two posts lined up to tell you! This one is a bit more personal, the next one is a bit more about the city itself.

        We hadn’t seen each other for just shy of a month and a half. On April 28th, M- went to Paris with her family. We’d spent an hour or two together the night before, after I finished my last term paper. On their way to the airport, they stopped by for a brief visit. I spent the next few days preparing to leave, then I left for Edmonton on May 1st. We didn’t see each other in the flesh until June 9th.

        It was hardest when she was in Paris, when the time zone difference made it hard to exchange e-mail more than once per day. When they got home, things were better - we could text and IM and Skype, without the distractions of Paris (said if flowery French). But even so, we’d never been apart for more than a few days since we met - we bonded quickly, shared most of our classes, and we worked together over the summer in 2012. So this was a test of our relationship!

        For a variety of reasons, the stars didn’t align for M- to start working until late May. I got a bit excited when I heard of the first delay - perhaps she could visit before starting work! I may have been a bit of a pest for a couple of weeks. When the first good sale came up, she booked the nearest flight that had a reasonable arrival/departure time. I wound up with a week for warning of her visit, but it was a lovely surprise.

        To be honest, we didn’t do anything terribly interesting. We curled up on the couch to finish the fourth season of Adventure Time. Over the course of the week, we caught up on the third season of Game of Thrones (her family has HBO!) We spent an hour in Chapters, browsing the manga, sci-fi and fantasy sections at length.

        We tried to play Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light in co-op again, only to be utterly baffled after being away from it for months. We laid in bed and held hands and chatted about fanfiction for an hour before going to sleep. We learned about communicating expectations, and that opening my e-mail on my phone and saying “hey, did you see this thing I sent you?” is not the best way to guarantee an answer. Read receipts are way better - I’m using Boomerang for Gmail now.

        I managed to convince her to make use of the Pokemon TCG cards I’d bought and left in Ottawa for her (one pack of cards for every week that I’m away!). Or, at least, she decided she could suffer a little to make me happy. At any rate, we played two games, and I was right in the end - she enjoyed herself and asked if we could play again in the future. Though I suspect we’ll need to beef up our decks a bit, because our second game was painfully long. But with that fixed, this may be our activity when we sync up on weekends from now on.

        I think it was good for us to be on our own for a week! We cooked together and did dishes together. We ate more dessert than we should have. It was, generally, a lot like living together. We managed fairly well! Granted, it’s nicer by far to be home with my parents, or with hers. But we didn’t get in each other’s way, and nobody died - both good signs. It was lovely to see her again, truly. I got sad during our last evening together, but like usual, she cheered me up pretty quickly. I did have trouble getting back into the rhythm of a full workday, but now I’m feeling pretty good. Only two months until we see each other again! I can manage that. I think.

A visitor appears!

A week ago (published Tuesday), I wrote:

The hardest part, I think, is being far away from my girlfriend. … She’s going to visit in July, as a birthday gift from her parents.

But then my mom sent me an e-mail about a sale on flights, which I duly forwarded. Then at 9am on June 5th, I received this text message:

How’s this for a visit: June 10th to 16th?

Hmm, let me think about that… I sent back another message to make sure she didn’t mean July, and she said yes. So I replied with the only acceptable answer: that would be fantastic! The final booking is for her to arrive tomorrow morning at 9:30am local time, so I’ll be taking a shuttle to the airport in the morning.

So instead of writing more tumblr posts tomorrow, I’ll be spending time with my beloved. If she’s feeling tired, I might do both of those things at the same time. Anyway, figured y'all Internet folks should know. We’ll be borrowing bikes from some of my colleagues (both of whom said “I really should use my bike more often, but you can borrow it for a week”) and seeing the sights. I’ve got permission to work half-days next week, and there’s some room at the office for her to work on her own stuff.

I’ll put up a list of stuff we did around the city when all’s said and done, assuming we actually do anything. Most people I’ve asked have only been able to think of one or two things to do here, so the least I can do is show that there are, in fact, options.

A month in Edmonton pt 2

        As far as work goes, I’m learning a lot of valuable stuff about natural language processing! I’ve been attending weekly meetings of the NLP research group, and going to AI seminars when the topic seems interesting. I’ll put up some notes from the good ones, I think. Anyway, I’ve been writing a lot of Python code, some of which I think is quite nice. I’ve learned how to process XML data with Python’s iterparse(), which is far more intuitive than any of the DOM-esque approaches I’ve looked at in the past. XML had never really “clicked” with me before this. I’ve also been parsing command line arguments for the first time, using argparse. Similar to the XML thing, I looked at optparse when I first started with Python 2.6, and it seemed sucky. Maybe argparse is a big improvement, or maybe I’m just “better” than I was then - either way, it’s a good skill to have.

        One other thing I’ve learned is that I hate working on things that don’t seem like they’re going to do any good. There was a period of a week or two where I was struggling to get to a point where we could evaluate the real-world performance of some programs we were looking at (more on this in another post). In the interim, I tested the programs on data from English, and the results were really not good. It later turned out that my calculation of the results was wrong (I tried to be Pythonic at the wrong time), and that a non-sensical tweak vastly improved the results.

        But even though the results did get a bit better, I got really demotivated, because I knew I had to keep working on the task. But I also thought that I already knew how it was going to turn out (badly), and felt like I was wasting my time. In the end, things were better than I expected, and we’re back to making forward progress - but it was sucky for a little bit.

        About two weeks ago, I worked up the courage to e-mail the university’s fencing club. I kinda figured I’d never get a response, but it turns out they answer their e-mails pretty quickly! So last week I went out to practice with them, got introduced to everyone, and so on. First, everyone there seems cool (not being facetious, I mean I should hang out with them some time). Second, my co-worker also fences, which is hilariously improbable. Third, man am I out of shape after not fencing for eight months. I could probably fence a few bouts to 15 a year ago, and last week I practically collapsed after five bouts to 3. This week we did drills, and I got some perfectly deserved advice/criticism from the foil coach. But I felt really, really good as I was walking home after practice. It’s nice to be back.

        The hardest part, I think, is being far away from my girlfriend. For as long as we’ve known each other, we’ve generally spent a significant portion of our time together. We text each other daily, chat on the phone every couple of days, and spend an hour or two on Skype watching Adventure Time on the weekends. We’ve got about half of Season 4 left to watch, then it’s probably on to the newest season of Game of Thrones. But anyway, it’s still a lot less time together than I’m used to.

        She’s going to visit in July, as a birthday gift from her parents. Which is sort of the most boring part of the summer, because her birthday is in June, while August has Animethon and my birthday. It’s the best time logistically, but still. I don’t think we’ll be able to scrounge up funds for a second trip, anyway.

        But I’m fine! Life is pretty good. I’ve got summer projects planned, but I don’t know which ones I’ll follow through on. Some things to get ready for September. I’ve got some physical and social activity outside of work. So stop asking me if I regret accepting this job every time we talk! glare

A month in Edmonton pt 1

I’ve been in Edmonton for a month now as of today. I’m definitely settled in, though there’s plenty of things I miss from home. I can’t really claim to have seen the city and formed an opinion on it, because I haven’t been anywhere that takes more than 30 minutes to walk to. But I’m happy about that! It’s really nice not having to deal with public transit. Also, walking gives me time to play video games.

        I started writing parts of this two weeks ago, but got kinda sidetracked. I’ll try to run quickly through a few big events…

        On May 10th, I got a tour of the “Linguistics department”, which is about one and a half floors of a building on the far side of campus. I learned that we have a lounge with a fridge and some other appliances, and that the department sells shirts that say “If you can read this, you must be a linguist” in IPA. Which is the best thing ever. I also got introduced to a lot of people. The whole process took… about two and a half hours. I got home around 7pm and was completely exhausted.

        I haven’t had an incredibly varied diet, except when I get lazy and waste money buying food on campus. Mostly it’s been pasta, rice, cereal, bread + peanut butter, and a couple of frozen pizzas when I got lazy. It’s strange being transplanted into someone else’s kitchen, where you know the things you want are somewhere, but you have no idea where. At any rate, I should really get around to buying cold cuts and other sandwich materials, plus meat and vegetables and such to add to rice and pasta…

        There’s a few niggling things about the furniture in my room. The desk and chair aren’t really home office quality. Which would be fine for lots of people, but I can’t keep going to bed sore because I was on my computer for more than an hour. But I’m not sure to what degree I can do something about that. I suppose I should talk to the home owners about it, but I don’t know what the etiquette on that is.

        Speaking of which, for the few weeks I only ever saw Mike, the husband. Last weekend, when he came back from Calgary on Sunday, he brought his wife back with him. They arrived around 9pm, and Cindy proceeded to spend three hours cleaning, decorating, baking, and more. It was really nice meeting her - she gave the distinct impression that they treat this place much like they treat their bed and breakfast near Ottawa. She said she’d clean my bathroom for me, fix the headboard on my bed, buy a slow cooker, and a bunch of other stuff. I mean, I’d totally survive if she didn’t do any of those things! But she said she’d take care of it all, which is super nice.

        My shower has apparently been leaking into the basement - turns out water was getting through some of the tiles and rotted out a part of the wall. So someone’s coming in to fix that at some point. Until then, I’ve been showering in the basement, which is fine. The other exciting not-living-at-home-anymore event was deciding to turn off the mini-fridge that came with my room. I uh… learned a bit too late not to unplug the power from a fridge and leave it closed afterwards. Apparently everyone knows that except me - I never asked why my mom does that with the spare fridge at our house… Had to clean it out, got water all over, but it’s good now.

        This got long, so I’ll post the rest in a few days.

Edmonton

As part of my new job, I’ve moved across the country to live alone for the first time in my life. I’d never been to Alberta (a province, for the non-Canadians) before, much less Edmonton itself. I’ve also never lived alone, unless you count a week maximum while parents might have been away. I’ve never gone hunting for accommodations, or debated the pros and cons of living in one house vs another. And I’ve never been this far from the people I love - a $400+ flight each way is a much higher barrier than a 5-15 minute walk or drive.

        So, this is pretty big for me.

        I was set to start work on May 1st, and my mom helped me book a direct flight early that morning. We were expecting to pay a lot, but apparently we were right in time for a sale, because the flight cost just shy of $300 after tax. We got a direct return flight, too, for the end of August - just at a slightly higher price. At any rate, even if it was as cheap as $600 round-trip, I don’t know if it’s worth it for me to go back home. Living expenses are cutting out a huge chunk of my income (nearly half, even if I’m frugal).

        Thankfully, parental contribution means I’ll get at least one visit from my girlfriend… But I’m already feeling a lot like a bachelor after being here for a week. Eating the same pizza for supper three nights in a row, anyone?

        Anyway, so that’s how I got here. In terms of putting a roof over my head, there happened to be an info session in Ottawa for the UARE program. Just a few days after I found out I’d be applying, in fact! When I went, I found out about the housing “board” run (in part) by the university’s Student Union. Through there, I found a room to rent in a house just one kilometer away - a 15 minute walk, essentially. It’s $650 a month, compared to $500/month for places further away - but I also get a private bathroom and a fridge to myself.

        So far: no regrets on the pricier place. I’m loving the location. I can wake up and get to work within an hour if I want. The extra $600 over the course of the summer will be entirely worth it, I think. I love being able to walk whenever I want, instead of having to obey the bus schedule (something I’ve never gotten used to, even after three years in Ottawa). Even though I’m theoretically 30 minutes away from campus in Ottawa, in practice it tends to take an hour for the trip. So there’s a triple benefit of freedom, exercise, and reduced transit time.

        On the last point: if we say I travel to campus 20 days out of the month, I’m gaining 13 hours each month in exchange for the $150. Not a bad trade, I think.

        I haven’t been here long enough to really evaluate my job itself, but I can say a few things about the University of Alberta campus. First of all, it’s really big. Or at least, it feels big, because their quad is a gigantic, flat, open space. They also have an indoor mall on campus, and today a food cart set itself up in the middle of the quad. I mean, you tell me - do those sound like things that would happen on a normally sized campus? (Though I’ve just realized that the one floor of their mall is probably equivalent to the four floors of Carleton’s University Centre, just horizontal. Still.)

        I do need to figure out an ergonomic situation for using my laptop at home, though. I also need to… maybe… meet some of the other three(?) tenants. Find out which name goes with which person. Maybe have one or two conversations with them, even. I’m debating paying for fencing classes while I’m here, though sadly they’re not within walking distance. Still, it worked for me in first year to get a bit of social interaction after I moved to Ottawa. Anyway, those are both aspects of getting settled in.

        The other thing where I don’t feel totally settled is food - I’m wary of buying too much, but I’d also like to have some variety. I’m kinda binary when it comes to how much I feel like cooking, and a parent’s well-stocked cupboards at home can support that. The space under the counter where I keep my food, not so much.

        Anyway, I just have to treat living alone and moving away as a set of exciting new challenges. The former is tiring to deal with at times, and the latter has left me lonely and restless at times, too. But it’s all part of the grand plan of my life, and four months can go by pretty fast if things are going well.

        Speaking of which, I haven’t written anything about my experiences this past school year, or summed up my thoughts about the summer of 2012…

Summer Job, 2013 edition

[[Granted, most people close to me are well aware of this, so it’s not exactly breaking news. To be fair, it’s only been about a month since the job was confirmed. This post isn’t that far past its expiry date… unlike some of the other drafts I have in the works]]

I’m officially working at the University of Alberta for the summer of 2013! I’m part of the inaugural Canadian group of the University of Alberta Research Experience program. In particular, I’m working for the summer with Professors Greg Kondrak and David Beck on a project that was listed on Kondrak’s website. It is, in a word, awesome. It’s going to be great experience, and it’ll be awesome to have references from another university. Also, it means living alone in Edmonton, which I’ll talk about in another post.

But, for now, I’ll settle for talking about how I got the job. A life lesson, so to speak. Step 0 is to know that these kinds of opportunities exist - so you’ve got that one covered, dear readers. In Canada, NSERC and SSHRC have summer internships, the details of which vary from one school to the next - but the basic gist is you need to find someone with funding, and offer to work on something with them. The funding agency (or the school, if the program is like UARE) will cover most of the cost, and the professor pays a much smaller portion of your salary. It’s a pretty good deal for them, too.

For my job last summer, I got started just by asking the head of my department who had funding from those agencies. This year, I told my supervisor, Robert Biddle, that I wanted to work on something that would take me closer to computational linguistics. He racked his brains and realized that he knew of someone at University of Toronto who did work in the area, Gerald Penn, and helped me with my introduction and asking for a phone interview. We spoke, and Penn told me about UTRECS at UofT, as well as UARE. Unfortunately, the deadline was long past for UTREC, but I get the feeling most of Penn’s work isn’t really undergraduate-level anyway.

So then I googled “University of Alberta computational linguistics”, and found this page. The rest, as they say, is history.

And that’s how a plain old interview (which I fervently hoped would turn into a job interview) indirectly got me a job! Networking, y'all. Well, no, networking involves actually building a network. Audacity and asking questions, I guess.

Whatever you call it, the point is you don’t have to graduate from university without any experience. Continuing from above, here’s some steps to follow:

1. Pick a thing you think might be interesting, like computational linguistics for me, even if you don’t know the first thing about it. You’ll learn as you go along.
2. Then use the internet to find people working in the area, and send a really nice e-mail telling them how great you think they are.
3. Tell the great person you’d like to work with how great you are. First, don’t lie. Second, tell them interesting and only slightly off-topic things like “I use Emacs” and “I think Haskell is cool”, which (in my opinion) make you sound genuine and help you stand out a bit. Third, if you’re lucky, have some kind of reference they can contact (can be as simple as mentioning who you’ve worked with before, and on what).
4. Admittedly, Step 3 isn’t exactly a perfect set of instructions. Ask someone to look over your e-mail before you send it! They’ll tell you if you sound desperate. Hopefully. Consider asking another academic, like a professor of a class you took, what they’d like to hear in an e-mail from a random student.
5. Don’t assume your first attempt will work out, or any of your attempts really. If you get multiple offers and they have conflicting deadlines, be clear with everyone involved where you stand - there was no problem with me saying “hey, I’ll accept this for now, but if I hear back from University of Alberta I’m going there”. Odds are they have backup candidates who are a bit less great than you, but will do an alright job anyway.

You probably won’t be so lucky as to find a professor with a webpage that says “hey, here’s things I’d hire you for” but they may still have something of the right size for four months of full-time work. If you’re feeling shy about contacting strangers, it may help to remember that if you do wind up working with them, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. If it’s not going to work out, they probably won’t even reply, or they’ll just say “no” and not much more. And that’s okay!

Anyway, next time I’ll talk more specifically about the job and what it’s been like moving out to live on my own for the first time. Spoiler: I haven’t died yet, but on the other hand, I only ate two meals today. Oops.

Four years later

Long time readers will know that many, many QWERTYs have been shed on this blog over the desiccated corpse of my love life. A lot of the posts under my personal tag, and certainly most of the very long ones, have had something to do with it. I needed an outlet to introspect, and to put things in public that I used to keep to myself. I’m sure the topic isn’t as interesting to most people as it is to me, but I find my long-term emotional development extremely fascinating. It’s too bad I only started writing in 2010, but that’s neither here nor there. Other involved parties weren’t exactly thrilled with all the details that I shared, but I’ve learned my lesson on that.

        That’s important, because I’ve finally entered another relationship.

        It’s been a month and a half so far, and literally everything has been great. I have to laugh at junior high relationships, though - I figured it was a real accomplishment to make it past a month! I mean, surely thirty whole days is plenty of time to ruin the whole thing. This time, it took nearly a month for me to understand that, yes, that conversation actually happened and she did in fact say yes. Ironically, I’m probably more surprised about this turn of events than anyone else. Most people who’ve known about our friendship thus far figured it was going to happen sooner or later.

The story

        This isn’t actually a case of complete stupidity on my part. You see, after we went to PAX East (note the seemingly-outgoing individual) I got pretty interested. I was told it was just going to be friends for now (read as: “until further notice”, aka indefinitely), and I resolved myself to be okay with that. Surely I could manage to be friends with a single girl without developing romantic feelings for her. I mostly did! When I figured I was getting a bit past friendly, I’d talk to her about it honestly, so she could shoot me down (though the opposite outcome would be a nice surprise) and we could keep up with business as usual. There was lighthearted ribbing about my being a lifelong bachelor every time I inhaled my food twice as fast as everyone else. But I always got the distinct impression that she wasn’t gong to change that. She contends she chose her words carefully to avoid saying that, but I guess I think about things too much for that to work.

        So I got annoyed when basically everyone gave me advice to take the initiative, asking me when I was going to make a move, and so on. Granted, I’ve come a long way for my days of telling everyone they “don’t get it”. So I did tell them, each time, that it wasn’t going to happen and that was okay. Which is ironic, in retrospect, because in early December I had just finished dealing with what I hoped was the last stupid anxiety that was making it hard for me to see her as only a friend. Then, out of the blue, our usual goodbye hug was supplemented with a kiss on the cheek. I asked why, and the answer was “because I wasn’t brave enough to really kiss you”.

        Well, in that case!

Obligatory cheese

        It was surprisingly easy to let myself start falling in love again. I initially worried that it might take a while to completely change the nature of our relationship. After all, I’d spent months trying to avoid any untoward interest. As it turns out, there’s a lot of overlap between being very close as friends and dating. Thankfully, I only spent about two weeks of stopping myself mid-thought to ask “is it okay to think that? oh yeah, we said we were dating now! okay, carry on, brain”. And, dear reader, I’m happy. I even accidentally accomplished a goal for 2012 that I didn’t have the guts to commit to! I wrote my first love letter in more than four years. That’s not for your eyes, though. As for what I’ll say in public, here’s the story I recently added to the Facebook event commemorating our change of relationship status:

    "It’s hard to know where to start with this kind of blurb. Maybe the fact that we’re two out of a very small group of people specializing in linguistics within cognitive science. Maybe our shared interest in anime, or video games, or books. Maybe it should be about how a pair of introverts always enjoy each other’s quiet company. Maybe it’s an afternoon spent reading in the sun beside a beautiful lake and a beautiful girl. Maybe it starts with a familiar hand, raised in familiar excitement, in one lecture after another. Or maybe it’s something a bit less romantic, like a nosy classmate telling you never to wear white sock with jeans - in fact, never wear white socks at all.

    Let it not be said that men can’t change; I now own several pairs of non-white socks.“

        Meanwhile, I managed to prod and nag my way into a few nice pictures of us together, which I’ve screencapped for the sake of the album description.

Moving forward, looking back

        I’ll be honest: it’s weird to be starting from scratch with someone new. I’ve literally never done that before. It’s weird to be in a healthy relationship. It’s weird to receive a genuine compliment from someone I have great affection for. It’s weird to not be scared to speak my mind, and it’s weird to want to smile so often, and that she borrows books from my shelf and actually likes them, and that we curl up on the couch to play videos games we both like, and that we can study together, and the list goes on and on. It’s weird to spend so much of my time with one person, and not have the slightest desire for anyone else’s company. I keep finding out how awesome weirdness is.

        It’s a big change, one that comes after years of trying to move on. Four years of being single, all told. Still, it makes these moments of "so this is what a relationship is supposed to be like” that much more powerful. Turns out that desiccated corpse had plenty of life left in it after all.

        I hope I haven’t gone on too long. I just want to do the story justice. I have a number of dedicated readers that I don’t speak to on a regular basis, and if you’ve read even half of what I’ve written in the past, you really deserve to know how well things are going these days. I’m excited, and I hope that makes you happy, too.

Matthew Darling: Bachelor of Cognitive Science

A year ago, the Cognitive Science department at Carleton took a vote on whether the primary name for our degrees should be changed from Bachelor of Arts: Major in Cognitive Science: Specialization in X to Bachelor of Cognitive Science: Major in X. I voted in favour, and so did most other people apparently, because earlier this year the BCog became an option for us. I’ve finally gotten around to making the change, and I’m pretty happy about it, I think. The requirements for me to graduate didn’t really change from what they were when I first came to Carleton and the current calendar, so it was an easy decision from that point of view.

The important change is from Bachelor of Arts to BCog. My first thought was “well, nobody’s going to know what to think about this weird degree only offered at Carleton”. Then I remembered that you can often get a BA in psychology, or a BS in psychology. They’re probably quite similar degrees, but odds are there’s one or two differences in required credits. Cognitive science gets a free pass on some of the BA staples like “breadth requirements”, so from that perspective it makes sense to make us separate. But the other aspect is that if I’m BCog with a major in Linguistics, it acknowledges that I’m probably only a few credits away from a BA degree in Linguistics. I can’t necessarily say whether my degree is primarily focused on linguistics or on cognitive science, so I can’t speak on whether “majoring in cognitive science” is better than “majoring in linguistics”. But the specialization thing has always been really confusing, and I’m glad to be rid of that.

It’s really weird to think I’m not far away from graduating. Most of my prerequisites in other areas were taken care of last year, but I had to do logic and philosophy of science this year too. This semester, I’ve got one required cognitive science course and three linguistics courses. Next year will be pretty similar, though at some point I’ll be doing an AI course. Over the summer, assuming I’m at Carleton, I’ll be doing an independent study course to learn statistics the hard way via R rather than the typical “stats for psych students who are scared of math”.

I say all of this because it’s equal parts exciting and scary. As it turns out, I’ve learned stuff over the last three years. Still, I haven’t decided on what I’m going to do after I graduate. This summer is going to be important, I think, for deciding what I’ll do when I graduate. Still figuring that out, though. I’ve been told I could potentially travel to work at another university over the summer, but the trouble with that is I don’t know what my options are. Or if my recommendations are good enough to be accepted by professors I’ve never met.

Anyway, I’ve got some meetings to arrange before I start making decisions. Though, of course, I’ll be screwed if I take too long on that. But then homework. And other things that need to be done. Blaaarg.

[please direct any funny jokes about my bachelor-tude to your usual communication channels, or comment so everyone can chuckle]