Back To The Grind: Not So Freshman Anymore

Summer's come and gone, and school's been here long enough for you to forget what the glorious waste of time summer was. For freshmen (or at least me), the newness of college life has worn off and a schoolwork-filled schedule has replaced the carefree attitude and never-ending party line-up of that first month.

In case you've been sleeping in and missing your 8 o’clock Calculus class too much to notice, it's now been more than 7 weeks since the first day of classes came and went. By now, some of us have skipped enough classes the match skipping one for the whole semester. Others have failed their first test. Others still may have remembered a paper’s deadline just in time for the professor to start collecting them.

But let's not be so pessimistic this early in the year. After all, for each bombed quiz, there’s been a party. For every all-nighter pulled to finish a paper, there’s been one pulled just for the sake of hanging out with friends. Many rewarding activities have taken place in the more than two months that we've been here. Life’s handed us a lot of gifts here. True, some are better than others, (Freshman Fifteen, anyone?), but life’s still pretty awesome, even if accompanied by fifteen pounds of pure fat.

In all seriousness, though, many enriching activities have taken place during the school year. The Career Fairs helped kick off our college careers by letting us all get a good look at our post-college ones, reminding us exactly why we’re burning the midnight oil every other night. At the CoC Career Fair, thirty companies were represented over two days. Well-known companies in attendance included Microsoft, NASA, Yahoo, McAfee, Inc., Lockheed Martin, and ADP.

Another exciting and, for many, more immediately relevant event was the CoC Research Day, held on September 25th. Students involved in doing research got the chance to showcase their work, and students interested in doing work got to see what, exactly, they’d be doing. Projects ranged throughout a double-handful of areas, with researchers of everything from cryptography to parallel computing to hardware-testing present.

More opportunities for students to get involved in research presented themselves at the UROC (Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing) job fair. I found a research position with professor Vuduc in the parallel computing department. The professor and I are meeting during this semester to solidify plans for formal research next semester.