miscellania

Today I spoke at Nations Ford High School career day to a bunch of freshmen about careers in computing. I talked about misconceptions about computing and about how diverse people and careers in computing are. I think it went really well, and it was a lot of fun presenting to the groups.

My favorite question asked today: "So do you party?" (My response: "Well, I have a lot of fun, but I mostly study really hard.")

List of careers that don't involve computing composed today: Child Watch at the Gold Hill YMCA (but not the Fort Mill one), being a hairstylist if you only take cash and don't put the money in a bank, a lemonade stand if you pick the lemons yourself, make your own sugar out of sugar cane, build the table out of sticks you gather in your yard, and paint the sign using berries.

High school students are great. We also made a connection with a programming teacher there at NFHS who said he would have me out to speak for his class soon. That'll be cool.

Other than that, it's just been a busy week. I spent a lot of time with my family on Monday night; my grandma had everyone down for dinner. It was a good time, and really rare, actually, since everyone was there. I had to say goodbye to Victoria, which made me sad, but that's okay. She'll be back for Thanksgiving and maybe I'll go see her one weekend too (although there is no space in my calendar for that). 

I'm watching the presidential debate. Hmm. I have no idea who I will vote for. 

Mk, I really have nothing useful to say, mostly just procrastinating from this work. I'll start working now. I have piano tomorrow morning and then it is finallyyy fall break! I'll be working on things all day tomorrow. It'll be good.

fall break?

No, of course not. I don't really get fall break this year. My days off will be spent writing pages and pages convincing people to accept me into their schools/give me money to go to school/give me a good grade on this assignment.

I am at home this weekend, though. My middle sister is home from college for her fall break so I came too to come see everyone. It's been good. I actually slept last night, and there's good food to eat here. Plus, I love my family a lot and I'm glad I'm getting to spend a little bit of time with them.

It's been a rough semester. I am exhausted. The schoolwork doesn't end and on top of that there's graduate school applications, fellowship applications, ACM stuff, and SLC stuff. I may have signed up for too much this semester. I wasn't counting on my grad school apps taking this much time and energy. 

On a happier note, it's beautiful outside! Next Monday Sarah, Sarah, Lea, and I are going to Crowder's Mountain, and I'm pretty excited about that. I love the fall. Now that my laptop has battery life, maybe I can take it outside sometime while I'm working through all these applications.

So the GRE went well. I was delighted with my scores. I sent the scores to Clemson, Virginia Tech, Brown, and MIT. I don't know that I'll complete applications for all of those but I aim to. So far, half the Clemson personal statement is written, and that's it. Still working through the rest of the personal statements.

I'm applying for somewhere between 1 and 5 fellowships. The biggest one is the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. It is a monstrous application. I've completed a pretty close draft of the personal statement of that one, almost a full draft of my previous research statement, and have started thinking about my research plan. The other applications are less intense, and I can kind of bend the GRF materials to fit them, so that's what I'm planning on doing. (They also have later deadlines!) Anyhow, the fellowship list is: GRF, NDSEG, Anita Borg, NSSE, and...DOE? I can't remember. I have a list somewhere.

I'm taking the computer science GRE subject test on November 8. I need to begin studying for that. It's a really difficult test. At least several friends are taking it with me. We can study together.

Classes are good. I barely think about them since I'm so buried in all else, but I'm getting the work done and doing okay in all of them. I can't complain. I work really hard but I have a lot of fun too. 

Here are the things I am looking forward to in life right now:

- the Halloween party Samantha and I are hosting

- going to Crowder's Mountain

- getting the bridesmaid dress for Sarah's wedding

- being done with all these applications

- getting enough sleep at night

- going to see my sister in Charleston one weekend

- getting my ESV study Bible in the mail this week

- Chad's musical theater thing on Tuesday

so yay. I won't die.

Hmm...what else...

Guess that's about it. Nothing outstanding or insightful, just getting through things right now!

I hope you all are doing well :)

october really?

nononono it can't be.

that means there is just barely a month for me to finish this fellowship application.

Apparently things are getting darker outside; I was wondering why I was waking up later and felt like days were shorter. Right...that's because they are. It took Mom saying something on the phone for me to remember about that even happening every year.

The weather's getting colder; it's nice and cool out during the nights. Cold, even. Supposed to get down to the 40s tonight, I hear.

I adore the fall. Hopefully I'll be able to finish these applications so I can spend some time outside one day.

for serious?

oh come on people. you're single. get over it. it's not the end of the world.

a short and scattered summary of this week

ants came back. i got bitten on the face. i was not happy. like a three year old I called my parents crying at 5am. i went home.

planned game night. worked really hard for it. only sixish people came.

saturday was one of the top ten worst days of my life, i think.

tried a new church Sunday. liked it. staying there for the next six weeks to complete this study. someone came up to me, asked me what my name was again, and then said "Well, Lauren, I hope you find a home here." and that's exactly what I want.

it was good seeing everyone at bible study.

didn't practice piano as much as I should have this week. got yelled at for my fingering on the Bach piece i've been working on. sorry ms. austin.

planned wednesday ACM meeting. only six students came. not as disappointed, it was still good for the people who were there.

software engineering is my new favorite class. i love my project. i love my team. i love the adult day center. and i owe my class a red velvet cake.

looonggg meeting with my advisor. we talked about everything. i feel better now.

forgot my homework for class thursday; left it on my desk. she doesn't accept late work >.<

made 60 cinnamon rolls last night. they turned out really good, but i should have been doing homework instead. oh well, i had committed to making them for Emily's shower. btw, apparently Earthfare does not sell crescent rolls.

meeting with STARS team went well today. i'm looking forward to this semester.

Amy defended her dissertation today. congratulations Dr. Ulinski! guess i'm not going to her wedding, today was rsvp day and i didn't :( i don't think i can just go to pittsburgh alone.

lane and i drank coffee and did schoolwork. well, i did schoolwork, he went through his rss feed. after that i went home and did more schoolwork. and now i'm still left with schoolwork to do. i'm behind on everything.

tomorrow = writing documentation, making SIGCSE draft, enough piano practice to make up for three days of slackness, math problemset, homework for programming languages, homework for networking, homework for programming competition, reading for allllll of those classes, drafting a personal statement, GRE (the real thing), dinner with awesome people, and a party. don't even ask me how that's supposed to fit within 24 hours. it'll have to be magic. right now i am nicely lining up all the little blocks on google calendar.

enough for now. 'night.

story of the day

This morning I woke up at about 3:30 AM and my legs were really itchy. I thought it was dry skin so I tried to go back to sleep, but after a few minutes I decided to get up and go put on lotion. Well, when I did, I found four brand new bug bites that were quickly swelling. I didn't know what they were from, so I put Benadryl on them, kind of freaked out for a minute, and then decided to go look in my bed to see if there was a spider there or something.

It was dark and my roommate was sleeping in the room. I didn't want to wake her up. I threw back my covers and looked around by the light of my cell phone. Nothing. Weird. I decided to change my clothes and sleep on the couch just in case there was a spider in my clothes somewhere.

I slept well. Finally I woke up at 9:40 when I heard my roommate get up. I told her about the bug bites, and she said that she had seen an ant on her arm last night. She proceeded to get ready. I went back into my room, threw the covers off my bed to find hundreds of black ants in my sheets and blankets, on my curtains, crawling on my floor, all over my walls, on the baseboards...

Bethany (roommate) and I sprayed everything with Windex. I threw all the linens in the washing machine (which surprisingly did not kill the ants, it took drying everything to handle that!). I brought ant spray after church, and we've sprayed everything down twice now. I also wrote an unhappy note on my RA's door asking for help.

So how was your morning?!

:)

much more to write about later.

dear myspace,

If you have to put things on your website like "Note: do NOT click back in your browser window!" then that probably  means there is something wrong with the way you are coding things.

Tom's notes about things being "down for maintenance" or "we're fixing this soon!" are also not very reassuring....

Please fix things.

Stop adding new features. They're confusing and only make things worse. Take a course in HCI and do some user studies about how people like your site...everyone's accustomed to it, but that's not an excuse for poor design. On my home page I see at least eight ads, seven drop-down menus, eight tab menus, six boxes, and five edit links. Do you really think people enjoy it being that complicated?

Instead of adding new things, make your code bulletproof. Fix your design. Then, focus your energy on doing what you do well first, and then expand after you've got something stable going. There are challenges to building and maintaining something so big, but I have faith that you can handle it.

k thanks!

lauren