Internships

[sparhawk]

I'm lucky enough that my school can afford not to hire incompetent professors--at least, when it comes to the subject matter; they haven't the greatest track record on hiring good teachers. It definitely cuts most of the crap.

 

Well, I know that my examples make that school sound as if all the profs were incompetent, which they were not. The major problem is that there is no time and money to properly upgrade them to current technologies, so they have to try and learn it on their own, if they want/need to be up to date. But this, of course, shows the lack of experience. We had other teachers, who were actually working in their own companies during the day, and did the teaching as a kind of hobby or passion, and they were quite different. You could really tell the difference just by listening to them, which did additional work, and which ones came directly from the university into the classroom, without fieldexperience.

 

At least I was able to remember it from then on!)

 

You see?

 

It can be a pain to go from not having to worry about memory management and always having built-in exception handling to the sheer torture pleasure of dealing with mallocs and the accompanying memory leaks and the all too easy buffer overflow.

 

I guess it depends on how the tutorial is constructed. There are really good assembly tutorials which start with the absolute beginnings and only start to go into such details later on. But how are you supposed to understand what a buffer overflow really is, and why it can be dangerous, if you don't know how memory is handled and what a stack actually is?

 

Despite that, you can learn a great deal about the lower things while operating at a higher level.

 

Of course. But many students don't even bother.

[Gildoran]

In math when we learned that quadratic equation I could never memorize it. A collegue of mine, who was pretty good in math, explained it to me in great detail and showed me how to actuall derive it. After that, I wouldn't have needed to memorize it, because I knew how to get at it, but the funny sideeffect was that from this point on I could memorize it very well. In fact even two years later I still knew, just from this (have forgotten it right now though as I almost never need it), but this was very impressive for me.

Same here... Although I still can't remember the quadratic formula, I can derive it whenever needed. Actually, despite being a math major, there's only like two mathematical formulas that I can remember, the Pythagorean Theorem, and

dotProduct(A, = length(A)*length(*cos( angle between A and B )

 

When I worked on this mod, I bought a book about mathematics in computer algorithms, and the good thing about this was that this particular book did not just show the algorithms and the maths, there is also a long chapter at the start where the author exaplins also WHY this maths work.

Is the book in English or German? If English, what is it called?

[sparhawk]

Is the book in English or German? If English, what is it called?

 

It's in English. Don't know if a german version is available.

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155860594...2637336-9200813

 

Of course you should check it first if it is suitable for you, because books are different for different people. But I found this book most valuable. And you can also directly contact the author and he responds via email, which was also a big help. So I can only recommend it.

[Crispy]

One assignment? We have a (required necessary for most degree tracks--including grad school) class that has fully a third of it in machine code! (The rest is split between assembler and C.)

Now that's just overkill. I believe the point of the machine code assignment was just to drive home the fact that everything is data, even instructions. Once you've got that, there's absolutely no point ever touching machine code ever again. It just makes things tedious.

[Maximius]

I think I can expect near equality straight away. Digital sculpting is a new art anyway, so it's not as if there are guys who've even been doing it for more than 3 or 4 years anywhere.

With experience I'm getting from working in real commercial pipelines as a freelancer, and the quality of my work, I'd never have to work as an intern to get a first time job in this.

Internships are for people who are either desperate, impatient, or both.

 

 

I think you would have a decent shot getting in on a far more equal level than most, but remember too that there are always political relationships that will get in the way. I had to learn this the hard way, you can have the best ideas, best skills, best whatever but if you rock the apple cart too much The Mediocrities will sneak up and back stab you fast. Remember the moral of the story of Amadaeus.

 

I worked at the American Philosophical Society museum here in Philly a few years ago as a exhibit interpreter. My tours were some of the best ever given, I was told by Society members and visiting academics, teachers and their student groups, you name it. I was fucking good at interpreting, taking very complex historical objects and developing a narrative that explained them from multifold angles at once. My crowning moment was when I used hand signals and a few words of German to explain the difference between a mastadon and a mammoth to a family from Bulgaria. I had Charles McCullough, the big wig historian, tell me it was the best tour he'd ever had there. I had Freeman Dyson, yes Freeman Dyson, and his wife tell me I gave the best tour they'd ever had there. Greg Bear came up to me at our annual dinner and publicly praised my work.

 

It was my department boss who did me in. One week I was the Golden Boy of the place, getting personal requests for tours, people writing letters praising me to the curator. Then, poof, I was accused of robbing the petty cash box, of yelling at guests, of sneaking out early, of sneaking into rooms that were off limits. I refuted all of the claims, demanded proof, demanded that other managers be brought in to corroborate these accusations. This woman hated and feared me, she was a dope, an art bureaucrat, a talentless ball of dust that didn't know what the pieces on display even were. She once told a group of fifth graders that our giant sloth and mastadon bones, once the property of T. Jefferson, were dinosaur bones. The fifth graders laughed and corrected her, saying that dinosaurs died out millions of years before these animals. She repeated the mistake a few days later with another group.

 

But none of that mattered, she knew what to say, who to say it to, how to couch it to make everything I did look suspect. The bureaucratic, or corporate, mind is a simple, savage thing not given to context or details but concerned with only control and suppression of dissent and difference. I was fucked, fired and told I had damaged the public image of the Society. After a solid year of nothing but compliments and kudos from high and low, a jealous mutt with the IQ of a starfish did me in, hard. I spent the next six months on my couch in the dark, dreaming of sinking my teeth into her neck.

 

So be careful, sometimes even doing your job >too well< is the thing that will get you canned.

Edited March 28, 2007 by Maximius

[Nyarlathotep]

Well, I know that my examples make that school sound as if all the profs were incompetent, which they were not. The major problem is that there is no time and money to properly upgrade them to current technologies, so they have to try and learn it on their own, if they want/need to be up to date. But this, of course, shows the lack of experience. We had other teachers, who were actually working in their own companies during the day, and did the teaching as a kind of hobby or passion, and they were quite different. You could really tell the difference just by listening to them, which did additional work, and which ones came directly from the university into the classroom, without fieldexperience.

That's the advantage of a research university, like MIT, CalTech, GT, or even ANU (amirite, Crispy?). The professors didn't just take some class, they had their dissertation in the same field, and are very much continuing their research.

 

You see?

I accidently left off the square root. You see? I was wrong!

 

I guess it depends on how the tutorial is constructed. There are really good assembly tutorials which start with the absolute beginnings and only start to go into such details later on. But how are you supposed to understand what a buffer overflow really is, and why it can be dangerous, if you don't know how memory is handled and what a stack actually is?

Of course. But many students don't even bother.

Actually, I was referring to the actual problem of having to deal with all that, rather than not dealing with it at all but knowing it in principle.

 

Now that's just overkill. I believe the point of the machine code assignment was just to drive home the fact that everything is data, even instructions. Once you've got that, there's absolutely no point ever touching machine code ever again. It just makes things tedious.

I think it was something like two or three assignments. The lectures were on computer architecture, rather than dealing with writing the machine code. Then again, I wouldn't really know; it was my roommate in the class, not me. I'll be taking the class in the fall though.

 

I had Charles McCullough, the big wig historian, tell me it was the best tour he'd ever had there. I had Freeman Dyson, yes Freeman Dyson, and his wife tell me I gave the best tour they'd ever had there. Greg Bear came up to me at our annual dinner and publicly praised my work.

OMFG!!! YOU'VE MET FREEMAN DYSON AND GREG BEAR?!?!?!? [/fanboy]

 

But none of that mattered, she knew what to say, who to say it to, how to couch it to make everything I did look suspect. The bureaucratic, or corporate, mind is a simple, savage thing not given to context or details but concerned with only control and suppression of dissent and difference. I was fucked, fired and told I had damaged the public image of the Society. After a solid year of nothing but compliments and kudos from high and low, a jealous mutt with the IQ of a starfish did me in, hard. I spent the next six months on my couch in the dark, dreaming of sinking my teeth into her neck.

I've always wondered about that. Is there every really a good way not to get backstabbed by the political pointy-haired bosses of the world?

[sparhawk]

This woman hated and feared me, she was a dope, an art bureaucrat, a talentless ball of dust that didn't know what the pieces on display even were.

 

LOL. I had once a project lead like this. I complained to her boss, which I was on good terms with, and he told me that she was project lead because this was the only position where she couldn't do much damage, because he assigned good programmers to her, which did the work from the lower end, and he himself did her managment doing the work from the upper end.

 

Funny thing was, we were three collegues assigned to her project at the same time. I was already at this company before, so I did just enough to get by. One collegue was always coming early and going late and he did all the major actual work, but he didn't do much documentation. The other guy was doing all kind of documentation, produced hundreds of pages without doing anything usefull and in the meantime he was installing all kind of additional software that was supposed to make him more productive. Needless to say that this project lead was most impressed with that phoney guy, even though he didn't write a single line of code and no usefull documentation. This was one project I enforced to quit, because the environment was pretty bad because of that stupid bitch.

[Maximius]

That's the advantage of a research university, like MIT, CalTech, GT, or even ANU (amirite, Crispy?). The professors didn't just take some class, they had their dissertation in the same field, and are very much continuing their research.

 

Except if your profs are so busy writing and publishing and expelling noxious gases that they have no real time/interest in imparting that knowledge. I am currently taking night courses at one of the Ivies, trying to worm my way into the Philo department. All the profs are more than qualified, but try getting one to answer your emails. The young, very cute, assistant prof who is helping me with my writing project tells me that the senior faculty ignore HER emails and shes in the goddamned department! Undergrads, grads who are not the students of the professor in question, and junior profs get blown off regularly. When a night student emails them, they probably aren't even aware the school has such a program.

 

OMFG!!! YOU'VE MET FREEMAN DYSON AND GREG BEAR?!?!?!? [/fanboy]

I've always wondered about that. Is there every really a good way not to get backstabbed by the political pointy-haired bosses of the world?

 

Yes, yes, and no! They are both really nice guys, Bear is the type you could offer to grab a beer with and he would spend the afternoon bullshitting with you. Dyson was like meeting Jesus or something, I told him "Sir, I am unfamiliar with all aspects of your work except the idea of Dyson spheres." He cackled at that!

[Nyarlathotep]

Except if your profs are so busy writing and publishing and expelling noxious gases that they have no real time/interest in imparting that knowledge. I am currently taking night courses at one of the Ivies, trying to worm my way into the Philo department. All the profs are more than qualified, but try getting one to answer your emails. The young, very cute, assistant prof who is helping me with my writing project tells me that the senior faculty ignore HER emails and shes in the goddamned department! Undergrads, grads who are not the students of the professor in question, and junior profs get blown off regularly. When a night student emails them, they probably aren't even aware the school has such a program.

That would be the disadvantage, yes. I'm fortunate enough that the admins at my school will breathe down the necks of professors who are caught out doing that sort of shit--the problem is that that is incredibly hard to do.

 

Yes, yes, and no! They are both really nice guys, Bear is the type you could offer to grab a beer with and he would spend the afternoon bullshitting with you. Dyson was like meeting Jesus or something, I told him "Sir, I am unfamiliar with all aspects of your work except the idea of Dyson spheres." He cackled at that!

I'm envious of you. Extremely so.

[Crispy]

That's the advantage of a research university, like MIT, CalTech, GT, or even ANU (amirite, Crispy?). The professors didn't just take some class, they had their dissertation in the same field, and are very much continuing their research.

Yes, you're right, ANU is a research university. (Only the most awesome research university in the country. ) And yes, it is an advantage.

 

Except if your profs are so busy writing and publishing and expelling noxious gases that they have no real time/interest in imparting that knowledge.

Hmm... I've never had that problem. All my lecturers have been very nice and more than willing to have discussions with students about their areas of research. Then again I am only in second-year.

[Domarius]

No matter what job you want, you always have to be a bit of a sales person for yourself.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Or set your standards low with regards to the job as I'm planning on doing.

[Domarius]

Well depends on your priorities - it's like working at the super market while you get through your uni degree.

[Ishtvan]

If you're at a research university, I would urge you to consider doing undergrad research early on. Your first few tasks may well be shit jobs, but when you get past that you can learn a lot by applying the stuff you're learning to real problems. I had great experiences doing that, and learned things a lot better than if I'd just done homework problems or exams on the topic. You also have the opportunity to talk to grad students and professors on a more personal level, and get a better idea of what people do in your field. Some programs also let you do research for pay.

[Crispy]

My degree has research courses built-in from next year onwards (it's a 4-year degree and I'm in second year).

[Nyarlathotep]

If you're at a research university, I would urge you to consider doing undergrad research early on. Your first few tasks may well be shit jobs, but when you get past that you can learn a lot by applying the stuff you're learning to real problems. I had great experiences doing that, and learned things a lot better than if I'd just done homework problems or exams on the topic. You also have the opportunity to talk to grad students and professors on a more personal level, and get a better idea of what people do in your field. Some programs also let you do research for pay.

Of course! Cooperative programs (like the one I'm applying for right now) are great too!

 

My degree has research courses built-in from next year onwards (it's a 4-year degree and I'm in second year).

So does mine, but it also offers a more direct version in addition to that. If ANU has a separate undergrad research program in addition to the normal stuff, you should probably do that.