I was visiting the NYC offices during the week of Feb 27 to meet some of my team in person. It was Friday, March 3, and I was spending it at the NYC office in Hudson Yards. Check out the view below! I was planning on enjoying part of my weekend in NYC before heading back to Chicago… little did I know what I’d be dealing with later that day.
So I’ve finally reached the end of my four years here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I’ve certainly made a lot of memories here and I’ll be sad to see it all go.
My last year on campus was spent doing a masters, and I wanted to reflect on that to also add my thoughts on completing a masters degree in computer science.
Why did I do a masters?
As an intern at Cask this summer, I had the opportunity to work on Cask's flagship product: CDAP. CDAP (Cask Data
Application Platform) helps you build big-data applications on a layer of abstraction over a distributed environment.
You can develop CDAP applications and test them locally on your computer, then package the application, and run it on a
distributed environment. Basically, you can use Mapreduce, Spark, and take advantage of the resources of a cluster,
Over the past two semesters, in the midst of learning algorithms, artificial intelligence search and probabilistic reasoning, low level C systems programming, and a whole lot more (10 classes, 8 CS, 2 STATS), I also got involved in an entirely unexpected open source venture: Arbor.
But first, let’s talk about Project Groot. Project Groot is a venture by UIUC’s Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to rebuild our organization’s website. Now, there were several issues we had long identified and complained about with the old system:
I started my freshman year of Computer Science at UIUC this past fall, and in the past five months I’ve been on campus, I really enjoy every moment I’m there.
The biggest difference I’ve noticed between high school classes and college classes is depth. The material that you learn in college is so much more interesting because the course focuses on a more specific topic within that field of study. Take quantum mechanics.