akrish

So we’re going to skip forward quite a bit in my israel trip to today. I promise to go back and write about the rest of my trip, which was arguably the best part. But now, lets jump to today…

I have 7 days left (by now it’s more like 6). I generally have very mixed feelings about leaving Israel. Part of me really likes everything about being here, except for my dormitory. I have a solid group of friends, I have a great, stimulating job, I get to play ultimate, go to the beach, eat amazing food, you name it. This part of me is really sad to leave.

The other part of me is really excited to go home. I haven’t seen my parents for almost 9 weeks and I haven’t seen my brother for even longer (I think I last saw him in January… ridiculous). Of course I also miss a lot of my friends from home and from college and I’m excited to see everyone. My parents would love to hear me admit this, but I actually miss home-made indian food, though I’m sure I’ll still complain about it when I get home.

So last night I took part in a ultimate game between the two teams in Tel Aviv. In my time here, I’ve gotten to know many players from both teams pretty well, and yesterday I had to say goodbye to many of them, because I’m not sure if I’ll be able to play ultimate again before I leave. And it made me pretty sad. I really liked a lot of the people who I played ultimate with, and unless I come back to Israel or they come to the US, it’s very unlikely that we’ll see each other again.

Fortunately, I did get contact information for many of them, and I plan to keep in touch, but it’s definitely not the same as hanging out or playing ultimate together. I do have a reason to come back though.

And as my time here quickly runs out, I’ll have to say more and more goodbyes to some really great people. I really wish I could spend more time with them before we have to part ways…

Ok wow this post and the previous one were probably really depressing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not moping around and wasting my last days, I’m “living it up”: doing as much as I can, eating great food, hanging out with my friends and making sure I take advantage of being here. But I do think about the depressing stuff every once in awhile.

Oh yeah, one more reason I’m excited to go home. I’m going almost directly to Bali for a solid week and a half of vacation!

With my senior year of college looming forbodingly on the horizon, I realized that I’m almost at that point where I have to make one of the biggest decisions of my life: I need to decide what I’m going to do after I graduate.

If I were Israeli this wouldn’t be a problem yet. I’d just be getting out the army, I’d go travel for a year or two, then I’d have to make the decision as I prepare to start college. Of course I only know this because I’m here, and
everyone around me is starting their undergrad at the ripe, young age of 22. I wish I could procrastinate it for at least a year longer.

Alas, this is probably not possible. I’ve procrastinated for too long already. However, this is not a lost cause. I’ve made huge strides in deciding that I want to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, which I guess I decided sometime during this last school year. To read about why I want to pursue research, read this. There are still many questions to be answered, the most important of which is: What area of computer science do I want to devote the next 4-6 years (and possibly the rest) of my life to?

For some people this isn’t a challenge at all. Some people take a class, love it, start research in that area and that’s it. Sometimes, I wish I were like those people, but things didn’t work like that for me. I’ve really enjoyed almost all of the computer science class I’ve taken, and although I’ve only done research in a couple of areas, I can see myself doing research on a variety of different topics. I really enjoy reading about the research being conducted in areas as broad as operating systems, distributed computing, databases, programming languages, algorithms, theory of computation, security, network security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational biology.

Aside: Actually, I’ve know about this problem for a long time. Whenever some asks me what I’m interested in I generally say “almost everything.” Most people think this is a good thing and I for the most part agree. It’s only if you plan on devoting yourself to one specific area, that it becomes “bad.”

That by the way is a list of candidate fields that I’m considering. There are two observations from this list: the first is that many of the areas are quite related. Like operating systems, distributed computing, and databases are “similar” in that they are often lumped together under the term “systems.” Same with algorithms and theory of computation and of course AI, ML, and Bioinformatics are very closely related. The second observation is that I could work on two of these things. For example, one of my current research projects would probably be classified under programming language security. This is a definite possibility, and something that I currently feel will probably end up happening.

On sort of another related side note: It doesn’t really matter what decision I have to make soon, it’s more of the fact that I HAVE to make a decision soon. Seriously, I’m not even 21 yet. How am I supposed to know what I want to do with my life? This is one of the things that really scares me about graduating (and there are many, many more, but living on my own in Israel is really preparing me to face some of them, and making things a lot less scary in general).

So how do I deal with it? How do I decide what to do in grad school, in my limited time frame of say 3 months?

My research experience has been largely in security, and I’ve been working in bioinformatics for 3 weeks now (oh my god only six more weeks in israel!). I really like both areas, so even between these two it’s very hard to decide. It’s
not something I can directly compare because my experience in each area has been very different. Even with experience, I can’t tell which one I like better, so who’s to say that I won’t like some other area that I haven’t tried equally or more? I don’t have time to get a feel for research in every thing I’m interested in.

So I’ve been stressing out about this for the past week or so, since my parents kindly reminded me that I need to start thinking about grad school. In my opinion, the next best thing to actually conducting research is to read about research, so I’ve compiled lists of papers for each area that I plan to read over the next couple of weeks. It’s going to be a lot of reading but from what I’ve already done I think it will really help me make this decision.

Alan Turing is hailed as the father of computer science. Yet he lived more than half a century ago, in a time when computers were incredibly different from what we recognize today. I’m taking a introduction to cs theory course this semester and we’ve been talking about some of Turing’s (and other theoretician’s) discoveries. The fact that most of the discoveries were made in the 30s and 40s truly boggles my mind. How can people make claims like, “There are functions that cannot be expressed by any programming language,” when the concept of a computer or a programming language has barely been defined? What’s even more amazing to me, is that many of these theories were correct and their proofs are still accepted today.

This train of thought got me thinking about what our lives would be like without technology, or at least without computers (There isn’t much correlation, I know). No doubt most of our lives would be drastically different. I spend tons of time in front of a computer hacking, reading news, email, and relaxing. Maybe it’s because I’m a computer science student that really enjoys programming, or maybe it’s because I’m a college student who gets most of his resources through his computer (via the internet). Whatever it is, my computer plays an integral role in my life and I can’t even imagine life would be like without one.

Maybe life would be a lot simpler. I’d wake up, have a cup of tea while reading the newspaper and walk over to class rather than wake up and immediately check my email (aka work). My deadlines would be a lot more relaxed because it’s harder to do things without the aid of computers. I wouldn’t be under as much stress (not that I’m really stressed out now) because my superiors (manager, professor, etc.) could not set incredibly high expectations for my performance. I read an article about how technology makes life more stressful awhile ago and in many respects I agree with it. Unfortunately, I can’t direct you to the article because I forgot pretty much everything about it.

At the same time, social dynamics would change. Rather than spend time IMing my friends or writing on their Facebook wall, I’d actually see my friends and spend time with them. There would be a lot more “quality” time with your friends because we’d all have more free time (I think) and we wouldn’t spend that time idly on the internet (because it wouldn’t exist). This sounds like a really good thing and one of my problems with computers is that it makes us (well me) a lot more anti-social.

Yet computers can’t be all bad. They make information much more accessible to the public, they make interaction and communication much easier and the also foster innovation. Without a computer, I’d master the Dewey Decimal system and know all the ins and outs of my campus library system. Now, I just use Wikipedia. The internet makes it easy for professors to post lecture notes and course information for the class to see, thus discouraging students from attending lectures, but nonetheless, communication is greatly facilitated. This company that I’m starting revolves entirely around computers. Obviously we’d have no business idea if computers didn’t exist. Certainly these are all good things.

So I’m sort of at odds. In some respects computers are really good but life seems like it would be so simple and wholesome if we didn’t have them. I guess the conflict doesn’t really matter since computers are here to stay anyway, but it’s interesting to think about what I’d be like if there weren’t computers. What would I be studying? What kinds of things would I enjoy doing? Would I spend more time outside? I don’t really know but it’s fun to take a break from reading about databases to think about these things.