¶ behind enemy lines Posted 19 years, 5 months ago on May 31, 2006
I've infiltrated the CS department at the University of Washington, and am collecting information on their daily activities in preparation for an eventual armed assault led by MIT undergraduate minions.

Umm.. by which I mean I asked Seth if he knew a good way for me to find a legitimate excuse to hang out in Seattle for the summer, and he contacted Steve Seitz, who was kind enough to give me some desk space for a few months. I'll still be working on my MIT projects, but will be doing so while in Seattle. So I'm technically a visiting graduate student here for a few weeks each month. I tried to get a UW ID card, but they wouldn't give me one cause I'm not _really_ a student =/ The conversation went sort of like, "Can I have an ID card?" "What's your student number?" "I don't have one. I'm a visiting graduate student." "No. Go away." "Awwww...."

It's quite nice here. Having only two bases for comparison, I'd put it at halfway between Brown and MIT. Brown CS is quite small, with fewer than 40 phd students, and MIT CS is ridonkulously huge, with 400+ phd students. UW is sort of in the middle, with 150 students, so it's a relatively close-knit enivoronment, but still has a bit of wiggle-room. Well, at least that's my impression after being for two days.

So far I've watched Aseem Agarwala give a very cool thesis defense, and fell asleep at a talk given by a Columbia prof. I'm definitely looking forward to meeting the UW grad students, if not just to see how things are done here.

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