On Saturday, I had my last Illinois Tech graduation as dean before I step down at the end of June. The College of Computing had nearly 1600 graduates and I shook many, many hands that morning.
After graduation I caught a plane to Washington, DC to attend the wedding of my daughter's college friend. We were invited because we became good friends with the bride's parents when we lived in Atlanta. My last trip before Covid was to DC for an NSF panel and this was my first trip to Washington since.
The out-of-town guests were housed at the Hyatt Regency Bethesda, coincidentally the same hotel that hosted STOC 2009. My favorite STOC talk of all time took place in that building. But I remembered nothing about the venue except for the jogging path near the hotel.
No trip to the DMV would be complete without seeing my co-blogger Bill Gasarch in person for the first time in years. We chatted about many things, most notably his last few posts where he joked about the new pope's undergraduate math thesis, taken seriously by both our readers and ChatGPT. I reminded Bill that we are the blog of record, often used by wikipedia as a primary source for much in and out of complexity. Later Bill took out the fake thesis titles.
With graduation behind me, not much more for me to do as dean before my term ends. On the plane ride home, I thought about the question everyone asks me: What's next? I have no idea, but it's going to be fun.
"my last Illinois Tech graduation as dean before I step down at the end of June."
ReplyDeleteHey! Otsukaresama! (That's the Japanese you say to someone who has completed something they put serious effort into, but all it "means" is "You're all tired out", which doesn't work in English.)
"The College of Computing had nearly 1600 graduates .."
Good work! Another Otsukaresama!
Today I read a news article claiming that Comp. Sci; graduate employment rate was terrible, a mere 92.3%, and that the big companies are in a bit of a retrenchment mode. That may be true, but 10 out of 11 students getting jobs immediately seems pretty darn good.
In case any of your graduates are feeling concerned, though, I can report that the new book "Beyond Cracking the Coding Inteview" is better than expected. I was reading along and going "Hmm. It sounds as though they've actually read the psychology literature on learning, and sure enough, they had a reference to one of the better books on the next page.
Now, you can tell them not to worry: at 72 I won't be competing with them, I'm just looking for a source of toy problems to code up. I _hate_ Python, but it's pretty much the only modern language that supports actually working with Unicode strings, and since I hate it, I haven't internalized the syntax yet, and have to look up everything I try to do. Sheesh. So thus the interest in toy problems.
Minor note: I was about to chuck my copy of the older "Cracking the Coding Interview" when a brief glance indicated that it seems to be quite different from the more recent "Beyond..." book.
Speaking of exam cram books, I found myself taking the GRE exams somewhat late in life (I had burned 4 years not getting a grad. degree in Materials Science from MIT), so I went to the MIT bookstore and grabbed a couple of GRE cram books. I took one of the sample exams, and did really really badly. Shock city (since my SAT scores (almost 10 years earlier) had been (for the time) get into Harvard and MIT no questions asked level). But I caught my breath and looked closely at the problems. The problems were bad, and my answers were fine. So the Cracking the Coding Interview books are good books in a landscape that's not problem free.
Whatever, best luck to your kiddies!
Delphi supports Unicode strings.
DeleteSheesh, guy. You're costing me money. If I'm going to prove you wrong, I'm going to have to do some Delphi programming, and that means buying some books.
Delete