overheard in providence

A brief educational retrospective:

1999: Eric graduates Stuyvesant Highschool and begins attending Brown University. At the time, he foolishly assumes that his affiliation with Brown will be limited to a mere four years.

2003: Eric graduates from Brown University with an Bachelor of Science in Applied Math/CS. In a shrewd attempt to avoid joining the workforce, or even pay for a U-Haul, he elects to remain at Brown and begins living with 9 of his yet-to-graduate friends. He also starts working for professor John Savage, securing his status in Brown’s directory as a “Class F Employee”.

2004: Eric is accepted to Brown’s PhD program and elects to continue working under Professor Savage as a computer science graduate student. Upon renewing his Brown Student ID, he immediately remarks on its absurdly distant expiration date: 06/01/10.

2006: Eric fulfills the requirements for a Masters of Computer Science and is admitted to PhD candidacy. Although he is awarded his Masters, he chooses to sleep in and skip the degree ceremony.

2008: Eric boldly relocates to New York City while continuing to work toward his PhD. The majority of his research-related discussions now take place between him and the cat.

2009: Eric’s proposed thesis, “Reliable Computing at the Nanoscale”, is approved! Completion of his third Brown University degree appears imminent.

2010: 9 agonizing months and 150 harrowing pages later, Eric sends out a finalized draft of his thesis to his thesis committee and schedules his defense for March 5th. He also relocates to Providence for his final semester in order to begin work with Professor Michael Black. He is enthusiastic about his new research area and extremely enthusiastic that he will not be re-renewing his student ID.

So there you have it. I’m back in Providence (at least for the semester), and I can now officially assert that my tenure as a Brown student has “spanned three decades”. I’m also looking forward to resumed blog posting (plus, the frickin’ olympics just started up again!)