Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Status Update
Does anyone still read this?? I removed the counter mostly because I forgot to save the HTML for it when I updated the theme. Anyway, feedback in the form of comments would be appreciated!
It's been a while ride these last couple of days letting dust settle and figuring things out. First and foremost, I have been unofficially rejected from CMU.
I guess I'm not overly surprised about this, only because I had always kept the possibility in the back of my mind. Discussing the matter with a few other people that are in the same boat (superb recommendations, histories of publications as undergrads, basically overall killer app) from other parts of the world has been "enlightening." If I understand the perspective correctly, it's almost that we've done a little too much. Very frequently very qualified students are rejected simply because they've come a little too far and probably wouldn't be a good "fit" with the department culture that they're trying to maintain. While I think that is largely bullshit, I can also understand it. I can handle rejection based on the grounds of "not a good fit," but it just sounds stupid.
Either way though I may still have many thousands of dollars in the form of an NSF grant. I won't find out about that status of that until the end of March most likely. That would be really ironic if I had an NSF fellowship and no immediate university to utilize it at. C'est la vie.
If I get the fellowship I'll probably just start doing some of the grad work here at ASU. I more or less have an open ticket to the majority of the campus and especially within the CS department. I want to make this an opportunity to branch out into something new, possibly try something different out that I hadn't really considered before. There's a new associate professor with the department that is also working in conjunction with the institute for human evolution that researches socio-economic modeling in computational scenarios. I want to see if he's taking on students...
What shocks me the most about all of this is how little upset I really am. I think I got a little too swept up in the idea that I needed to be somewhere else (particularly CMU) and stopped paying attention to everything I have going on here. For all I know this could be the best thing that ever happened to me.
I have a good job, I'm going to be spending two weeks this summer in mainland China, open ticket at ASU's computer science department, seeing a damn terrific guy. Life is good, yeah?
This really reminds me a story one of my martial arts instructors had written somewhere a long time ago:
---
Once upon a time there lived a man in a village in the mountains along the China-Mongol border. He lived happily with his wife and son on a small farm. One day their only horse got loose and ran away. The villagers all said "Oh my, what a tragedy. Your loss is terrible."
To which the kindly man replied "Perhaps this is really a blessing in disguise."
The next year the horse returned, except it had found a mate. The horse's mate was a horse fine enough for the emperor himself. The villagers all proclaimed "What astonishing luck!"
To which the kindly old man replied "Perhaps this is really a disaster in disguise."
Several weeks later the man's son attempted riding the new horse, and was flung off breaking his hip. Once again, the villagers proclaimed their sorrow for the man and once again he said it was probably a blessing in disguise.
The following month there was a mongol invasion to the north and all able-bodied young men in the village were conscripted except for the boy with a broken hip.
Everyone who went to join the army was killed in combat without exception.
Good and bad are often only perspectives, and without time, lack context. Write that down.
It's been a while ride these last couple of days letting dust settle and figuring things out. First and foremost, I have been unofficially rejected from CMU.
I guess I'm not overly surprised about this, only because I had always kept the possibility in the back of my mind. Discussing the matter with a few other people that are in the same boat (superb recommendations, histories of publications as undergrads, basically overall killer app) from other parts of the world has been "enlightening." If I understand the perspective correctly, it's almost that we've done a little too much. Very frequently very qualified students are rejected simply because they've come a little too far and probably wouldn't be a good "fit" with the department culture that they're trying to maintain. While I think that is largely bullshit, I can also understand it. I can handle rejection based on the grounds of "not a good fit," but it just sounds stupid.
Either way though I may still have many thousands of dollars in the form of an NSF grant. I won't find out about that status of that until the end of March most likely. That would be really ironic if I had an NSF fellowship and no immediate university to utilize it at. C'est la vie.
If I get the fellowship I'll probably just start doing some of the grad work here at ASU. I more or less have an open ticket to the majority of the campus and especially within the CS department. I want to make this an opportunity to branch out into something new, possibly try something different out that I hadn't really considered before. There's a new associate professor with the department that is also working in conjunction with the institute for human evolution that researches socio-economic modeling in computational scenarios. I want to see if he's taking on students...
What shocks me the most about all of this is how little upset I really am. I think I got a little too swept up in the idea that I needed to be somewhere else (particularly CMU) and stopped paying attention to everything I have going on here. For all I know this could be the best thing that ever happened to me.
I have a good job, I'm going to be spending two weeks this summer in mainland China, open ticket at ASU's computer science department, seeing a damn terrific guy. Life is good, yeah?
This really reminds me a story one of my martial arts instructors had written somewhere a long time ago:
---
Once upon a time there lived a man in a village in the mountains along the China-Mongol border. He lived happily with his wife and son on a small farm. One day their only horse got loose and ran away. The villagers all said "Oh my, what a tragedy. Your loss is terrible."
To which the kindly man replied "Perhaps this is really a blessing in disguise."
The next year the horse returned, except it had found a mate. The horse's mate was a horse fine enough for the emperor himself. The villagers all proclaimed "What astonishing luck!"
To which the kindly old man replied "Perhaps this is really a disaster in disguise."
Several weeks later the man's son attempted riding the new horse, and was flung off breaking his hip. Once again, the villagers proclaimed their sorrow for the man and once again he said it was probably a blessing in disguise.
The following month there was a mongol invasion to the north and all able-bodied young men in the village were conscripted except for the boy with a broken hip.
Everyone who went to join the army was killed in combat without exception.
Good and bad are often only perspectives, and without time, lack context. Write that down.
# posted by Chris/Stewy @ Wednesday, March 01, 2006 
