Saturday, September 29, 2007

Beer day on campus


Today is yet another home football game at Virginia Tech. I do not mind the concept of college sports, but at Virgina Tech, the game takes over the entire campus. People are actually encouraged to drink alcohol on campus, which is a 180 degree policy reversal from every other day of the year. The power of the almighty dollar.

Friday, September 28, 2007

Bitter grad student

This would be the blog of a bitter grad student, but instead I will finish my MSEE shortly and get on with my life. For the past many years I have been happily chugging along in grad school doing interesting software defined radio work. At times, it has been a lot of work.

Sadly, our group (for various reasons) has acquired a student who does not have a sense of community and focuses only on his personal goals and does not share in the larger project goals.

Recently, we made a commitment to support a company who did a presentation of our work at an industry meeting. I helped the company get our work running on a gumstix embedded system and we hoped to show the debugging tools this student is supposed to be working on monitoring the system. I had been told this would work, when it did not work, I was told this was not his problem. After some emailing people trying to figure out who should solve the problem, he appeared to show a little interest in the problem.

This email from the student in question to his advisor is why I am desperate to escape this lifestyle:

ADVISOR

My schedule for today:

8-10 In the lab
10-11:30 Engineering expo
11:30-12 Lunch
12-12:30?
12:30-3:30 class
3:30-4:00 available as long as COMPANY does not show up early
4-5 giving COMPANY a tour of the lab
5-6 Hughes information session
5-5:30 ?
5:30-7 Engineering Expo wine and cheese reception
7 Going home

I am obviously very busy, but I will do my best to help out during any breaks I manage to squeeze in.

Have you by chance asked SPONSOR about the error (or lack of an error for that matter)?

STUDENT