Flashes of Panic

Since I know both of you are waiting anxiously to hear how the rest of my afternoon went, I’ll spill.

Before I get too far, though, an aside: I’m not mentioning the names of the university or the professor, not because I’m trying to keep them secret, but because I don’t (yet?) want to turn up on web searches for those names.

I went in to the department office and grilled the graduate admin for a few minutes. Unfortunately, she’s a temp and had only been there for three months, but she was able to tell me some about aid. This department has three types: the typical TA, the common RA (Research Assistant,) and the decidedly atypical SA. That’s Systems Administrator: they have a number of students helping to run their network. More on this later. I discovered from others that all three are classed as “aid:” they come with small stipends (“Enough to survive in the area”) and tuition remission. Anyway, the admin was very friendly and I made a point of treating her as though she did know things—if, in fact, I go there, and she’s still in that office, she’ll be a very good ally to have.

I went up to my meeting and found the door closed. I knocked to no response (not surprising.) I waited for a while, getting increasingly frustrated. What if I took a precious vacation day from work and hauled my way out here and didn’t have the meeting? Eventually I remembered my allies in the department office. I went back down and asked if they were sure he was in this afternoon. There was another professor in the office: “A. might be in Professor D.’s office. Try there.” Sure enough, they were puzzling out some problem in there. He met me in the hall on my return trip.

We spent ten or fifteen minutes on my situation. Academically, I’m a long shot for them, not because of my grades or unorthodox undergraduate major, but because of two missing courses: Programming Languages (something I’d actually like to take, since it explains things like memory management, the differences between strongly typed and dynamically typed languages, etc. etc.) and Data Structures and Algorithms. “Generally speaking,” he said, “We’re not too strict about the prerequisites. We want some proof that you can take a math class. And we want some proof that you can program.”

Curiously enough, despite having a minor e-commerce system and an evolving CMA under my belt in PHP, I wouldn’t tell you “I can program.” I’m not sure if this is over-modesty on my part, or if there’s some truth to it.

He said they sometimes accept students “conditionally,” which meant that they essentially spent their first semester on academic probation: in order to stay in the program, they need Bs in all their courses. The discussion of “aid” came here. “We’re not accepting you as a student,” he said. “We’re hiring you for a job, and paying you partly with education.”

We then adjourned to a Wednesday colloquium required for all full-time graduate students. The presenter was a professor (a theorist, I assume) from a nearby, much larger university (and, curiously, one which is also on my list,) and he was explaining recent research they’d done which involved linear algebra and, apparently, a method of simplifying the solution to a set of very time-intensive computational problems dramatically. I swear what he was saying made some sense to me at the time, though I had no idea where he’d started (we joined the talk already in progress.) I did determine that (a) CS professors really can actually speak in the jargon I read in their research papers, and (b) I can learn some of that jargon given the right context.

I met a few students as we were leaving the colloquium, one of which Professor A. introduced me to specifically because he was one of Professor A.’s advisees, and he spoke some Russian. So I was introduced as the one who majored in Russian. (I have a feeling this is going to be my parlor trick: “He’s the one who majored in Russian.”) He looked at me, expectantly. “<I’ve forgotten most of it,>” I explained. “<I never knew much,>” he replied. “<My wife is Russian.>” We went back to English, and I asked about which program he was in. The MS, he replied. I asked why he’d chosen not to take the Ph.D. track. “I don’t need that headache,” he explained. “I just want a good job. The Ph.D. doesn’t help you with that. I need to graduate and earn some money.”

Back at the office, I got a full explanation of just what had been explained in the colloquium. Professor A. was so excited by it he was laughing more than once—you’d think the presenter had just explained how gold thread could be spun from ordinary wool. Again, I almost understood what was going on. Then came a brief digression into the recent faculty politics of the graduate school (not department politics, apparently, but university politics) and another swing in which I was taken next door for a tour of the server room. Racks on racks of Dells with Linux, a cluster or two of Suns, and load-balancers. “I’m responsible for four major releases of this load-balancing software,” he announced. “I kept finding bugs.” (Modesty does not appear to be Professor A.’s strong suit.)

The next stop was probably the most interesting one: as we left the server room, it struck him to introduce me to the new head sysadmin. Now, I had skimmed a copy of the campus newspaper during lunch, and this new sysadmin was hired recently to upgrade the network support for the entire graduate school, not just EE and CS. It turns out he’s essentially just planning on scaling the CS network up for everyone, and I found myself in what was almost a tentative job interview. What did I do at work. How was our web server set up. Was I using Apache. What other packages were built in with Apache. What *nixes had I worked with beyond Red Hat Linux. Did I program with C and C++. (Barely, more comfortable in Perl, even more comfortable in PHP.) Then we digressed into computational linguistics—a topic I know little about, but wound up in because I needed to spell my name. Due to the regional accent I grew up with (but, largely, stifle,) people often misunderstand it, so I have to clarify. He was fascinated. How did it differ from the Boston accent. How would my name be pronounced if I wasn’t hiding the accent. He moved in to a databasing project being done by a German professor, and noted that a background in languages could be a very useful thing there.

I didn’t exactly leave with a job offer, but something like, “Stay in touch, we have work for people with your skills.”

I left feeling pretty good about my chances at this university. It was a beautiful day for campus visits, in any case, but all the people I met were friendly, optimistic, and clearly enthusiastic about the work they were doing. I was too late to talk to anyone in graduate admissions, but I left my coin with the mascot’s statue. (I’ll have to leave him unnamed as well, but the pennies go on his trunk, which should tell you all you need to know if you know the schools in this area.) I drove back into the sunset, saw a deer browsing beside the road as I navigated heavy traffic, watched contrails, and had a blinding flash of inspiration about a project at work which I had to pull over and write down lest I forget it.

I need to visit another department so I have something to compare this to. I don’t have a baseline to say, they were good, but this is even better. And while I liked and appreciated Professor A.’s enthusiasm, as I drove home I realized he reminded me of no one so much as my first-year Russian professor, who suckered me in to that department. I haven’t yet established if I should consider this a good thing.