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A year ends...
Last weekend marked the end of our Masters in Information Technology in eBusiness Technology program. It was a long last week, first we gave a presentation to our customer, who was thrilled and dazzled by our work, then we had several late nights to prepare for the final presentation to a panel of judges, which we had on Friday.
We didn’t win the grand price, but we were very happy with our presentation and are certain that we came in a close second. After the presentation our client took us to Dave and Busters for a night of fine food and games. At the end he surprised us with a gift certificate, because he felt we really deserved a price. And this meant much more to us than if we had wooed the judges into awarding us the grand price. After all we had been working nine weeks for our customer and not for the judges.
Saturday night, my family and friends had a very nice dinner in the Tin Angel Restaurant on Mount Washington. The five course menu, actually a four course menu with a tiny bite of melon at the end, was really good, especially the main course. In addition we were fortunate enough that it was a nice and clear night offering us beautiful views of Downtown.
On Sunday our program had its very own graduation ceremony. We all got to wear the classic academic regalia (cap, gown and hood) and could walk the stage to receive a piece of paper (our diplomas won’t be ready till October). It was a very nice experience and at the end we of course had to throw our hats into the air ;).
This concludes my adventures with the MSIT eBusiness Technology Program. I made some great friends, lived through challenging but also interesting times both on- and off-campus (Steelers winning the Super Bowl and Penguins winning the Stanley Cup in the same year!) and I wouldn’t want to miss a minute of it.Labels: cmu, Master, pittsburgh, usa
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Graduation Dinner, Party and Moving
This week has been extremely busy. First I had to start packing to be ready when I'd move out on Saturday. Then we had a Graduation Dinner Thursday night at Monterey Bay Fish Grotto, allegedly one of the best restaurants on Mount Washington. However, we were not that thrilled by the food. Even though we valued a choice of six main dishes, four of which were fish, the orders were slightly mixed up and the taste didn't reach our high expectations.
On Friday evening we had a small party on the top floor patio, where I finally could try one of the most (in)famous American games, at least in university circles: Beer Pong. The goal is to try to hit a ping pong ball into your opponents cups. That is much harder than it sounds and we managed to epically fail and not hit a single cup...
On Saturday I thought I'd sleep in to have enough energy for moving, but nature conspired against me and I was wide awake by 6:45am. Once awake my conscience started bugging me that I couldn't leave my apartment in its current state. You have to know though that expect for the stove it was already cleaner than when I moved in. So I thoroughly cleaned the whole flat for 3.5 hours. Now I'm willing to bet 100$ that this apartment has never been this clean, when a tenant moved out, in at least the last twenty years!
And now I'm waiting for kind Marcos, who generously offered me a space in his living room for a couple of days, until I can move to a hotel, and also offered to help me move the last of my stuff.
Lots of pictures from all these events can be found in my gallery.Labels: cmu, Fun, Master, pictures, usa
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Painting The Fence at Carnegie Mellon University
One of the most intriguing and fascinating traditions at Carnegie Mellon University is painting The Fence. The Fence is located in the middle of the cut (basically the center of the main campus) and is a highly visible landmark on campus. Student groups are allowed to paint the Fence only during the time between midnight and sunrise and only using regular paint and regular brushes (if you use spray paint, you'll get cited for vandalism!). As long as two people are stationed at the Fence, no one is allowed to change it's message and thus one regularly sees tents around the Fence while school is on. Fortunately, in summer everything is a bit quieter and we did not have to fight for it and could pick a day with perfect weather.
We decided to dedicate the Fence to the practicum of our MSIT ebiz Program and could persuade our client to sponsor the paint and brushes.
And so we met yesterday at midnight to start this project. Painting the groundwork was very fast, with five people and five big brushes we finished in under an hour. But once the color started to dry we spotted many places where we needed to add a second layer. Once everything looked good and the paint was sufficiently dry we started applying our message. This was more difficult than expected. For once we only had one small and one medium brush available, so only two people could write at a time. Another issue was that with the ongoing night, we did a couple of spelling mistakes, which threw us back a bit, since we had to recolor the section and wait till it dried again. We completed the final touches at 4.45am, much later than we expected. But we were incredibly happy with the outcome. The orange ground color looked fantastic against the green grass background.
More pictures in my picasa library.
PS: Since we did not find any information about supplies needed to paint the fence, I wanted to share this with you. We used:- 2 gallons of ground color
- ~1/4 gallon of writing color
- 5 big brushes (4 inch) for the background color.
- 1 medium brush (2 inch) for the letters on the pillar. [this was not enough. Would suggest 2 to 3 of those]
- 1 small brush (1 inch) for letters on rest of the fence. [this was not enough. Would suggest 4 to 5 of those]
- 1 roll of masking tape for straight letters on the pillar
These numbers heavily depend on the number of helpers you can organize. But we could have saved a lot of time if we had more small brushes for writing.Labels: cmu, Master, pictures, pittsburgh, university, usa
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Games & Early Thanksgiving
Even though I attended another Game Club meeting yesterday, it was cut short by other plans. But one thing after another.
At the Game Club I played Tigris & Euphrat, one of my favorites, and Brass. Brass is a strategy game revolving around the industrial revolution offering a very interesting game play, and I don't say that just because I won the game ;).
But then it was time for the official part of the evening. Our program held an early Thanksgiving Dinner at the Pittsburgh Golf Club, an event I couldn't miss! The food was very authentic - turkey, sweet potatoes (with marshmallow topping), cranberry sauce, beans and more - and extremely delicious. So in the true spirit of Thanksgiving (eating too much ;) ) I had two helpings of the main course and tried all the deserts. The Pumpkin Tiramisu was quite exotic but also very tasty. Even though the evening ended a bit abruptly, and we didn't get a chance to take more group pictures, it was a very pleasant experience ^^.Labels: cmu, games, Master
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1 Task down, 15 more to go
Yesterday we presented our first Task, which focused on Ubiquitous Computing using RFID in a hospital environment, to the class and the faculty. I was the chosen presenter and I was so nervous that I dropped my notes and got lost once or twice, but everyone was very impressed by the presentation so it maybe wasn't all that bad ;).
After the presentation I was extremely relieved. And the tension which was building the last couple of days while we were completing the report (till 1am on the weekend, 3am on Monday). This marked the first time I had to work till late into the night to get a report finished, and even then we only finished "on time" because we got an extension... Anyways, we're trying to do better on the second Task which started today, builds on Task 1 and focuses on Requirement Elicitation, fortunately I have a head start in this area :).
However, with my electives I see more late nights coming. Fortunately, it isn't as bad as Guido's program which made him work till 3am repeatedly over the last couple of days...Labels: cmu, Master
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Classes and Activities
Yesterday I had my first "real" class, i.e. a class which is lecture based and visited by students from various programs. The class is called "Social Web: Content, Communities and Context" and analyses how social online communities function, what works and what fails in these environments and the social implications of spending part of ones live online. One of the homework assignments will be playing World of Warcraft ;).
Because all day studying and learning leads to an unbalanced live, I decided to join the Western African Dance class. The session lasted 75 minutes and was a lot of fun, very exhausting and extremely painful for the feet (I had huge blisters afterwards), but after a couple of times my feet will surely get used to this torture ^^.
This morning my final new class started. "The Law of Computer Technology" looks at the US judicial system and analyzes computer related topics such as copyright infringement, patents and much more. Definitely a more "serious" class, but certainly very interesting.
That's it for the moment. Gotta go home and check if the gas (for cooking) is finally running...Labels: cmu, Master, pittsburgh
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Scholarship and goodbye Switzerland
Today I received great news. My scholarship application was granted! The Swiss government, the federal office for vocational education and technology to be exact, will cover 1/3rd of my study fees and living costs. This scholarship was granted to me because of my excellent undergraduate degree and is merit based, thus half the amount will be paid after the start and the other half after the successful completion of the program.
The notification letter came just in time, because today is my last day in Switzerland. Tomorrow morning I will fly to Pittsburgh and thus start a new chapter in my life :)Labels: Master, Switzerland
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Who wants to study at the University of Florida?
This week I finally received an update from the University of Florida. I was not only accepted but also qualified for an Achievement Award for New Engineering Graduate Students thanks to my very good GRE scores. Reading the rest of the email I noticed the reply by date, which was the 21st of March!
The day after I received another e-mail from the University of Florida, this was a bit directer and asked me why I haven't yet responded to the "several e-mails reminding you that you have been accepted". This reminded me of Guido's story, he received first this "reminder" e-mail before he received his note of acceptance.
In a way this was the perfect end to my relationship with the University of Florida, which stood under a bad star from the beginning. First I had trouble with their online application form (e.g. I couldn't enter my international phone number, my letter of motivation was truncated without warning) then I received an email telling me that the application status would be visible online, however the five step process to get to this page could only be completed with the Internet Explorer (Firefox somehow wasn't compatible) and when I finally was on the page there was no mention of the status of my application...
All in all the University of Florida didn't leave the best impression behind and I may even have declined their offer if they were the only ones to accept me... And with an offer from Carnegie Mellon University they had no chance of my attendance at all.Labels: Master, university, usa
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Wow, CMU!
I just received the Letter of Acceptance for the Masters of Information Technology Program in eBusiness Technology at Carnegie Mellon University!
I'm intensely relieved, incredibly happy and speechless *g*Labels: Master, university, usa
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Oreo Ice Cream in Central Park & Resident Evil: Extinction
On Friday, I visited Columbia University. I was very impressed by the size of their campus, especially considering that it is (almost) in the middle of New York city.
On my way to Times Square I crossed all of Central Park. I was positively surprised by the forest in the Northern parts of the park and enjoyed hiking through it. Central Park is huge and it took me almost two hours to get through, no wonder then that I got hungry in between. Since the weather was nice and very warm an ice cream seemed a good option. Spotting an Oreo Ice Cream, I didn't need to think twice what to buy ;).
Times Square was also bigger than I had thought and very confusing to boot with the many roads intersecting and crossing there. Still the commercials were a sight to behold and it was interesting to see what shows were currently playing on Broadway.
After meeting up with a former student from the ZHW who is now studying at Columbia for dinner, I decided to catch another movie.
Resident Evil: Extinction
The movie was everything I expected of it: entertaining and bloody with cool action scenes. The cinema was almost sold out and the audience participated vividly, clapping and encouraging during cool scenes. The only thing that shocked me at this movie was a 4-year old boy who was in his stroller in the aisle, accompanying his parents (the film was R-rated!).
Rating: 8.5/10Labels: Master, movie, university, vacation
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TOEFL update
My TOEFL scores just came in! And they are almost as expected: excellent in the Reading, Listening and Writing Sections (29-30 out of 30) and mildly disappointing in the Speaking section (24 out of 30), which leads to a total of 112. As I mentioned in my previous post the testing conditions for the speaking part were not ideal and I was got distracted by other test takers... Nevertheless, I'm happy with the good result and am now looking forward to take the other hurdles in my way to a Masters Degree in the US :)Labels: English, Master
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GRE update
The results of my GRE arrived today! As I already knew the Verbal and Quantitative Scores I was dreading the result of the Analytical writing task... However, I needn't have worried, I got full marks and scored 6.0 on a scale from 0.0 to 6.0 :).
Just one more week and I'll get the results from the TOEFL as well.Labels: English, Master
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TOEFL
Last Saturday was the big event, I took the TOEFL ;). It could hardly have been more different to the GRE. First, it was in Zürich, that is to say close to my home. Second, registration started as announced 30 minutes before the test time. Third, there were about 40 people taking the test at the same time...
To the test. The first block was dedicated to Reading Comprehension. We had to read three texts and answer several questions. The texts were quite technical from various fields and even though some of the questions were a bit challenging, compared to the GRE Analytical it was a breeze. Next was Listening Comprehension. We listened to 9 lectures and discussions, answering questions about the main points as well as some details of the texts. For me this wasn't too tough either.
After a ten minute break, the TOEFL continued with the Speaking part. Basically this wouldn't have been too difficult either; we had to talk about general topics, summarize discussions, as well as combine information from texts and spoken dialog. The challenging bit was that there was only 15 seconds to prepare for 30 seconds speech and that several students were speaking at the same time (the answers being recorded by the computer). Several times I got distracted by other students and almost lost the thread of my argument.
Finally we had to write two short essays, first about a general topic and then summarizing a text and a lecture. The hardest part there was writing concise texts and not to get lost in long sentences.
Now it's time for the waiting game ;). The results are due in 15 business days.Labels: English, Master
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Goodbye GRE, welcome TOEFL
Finally, after two months preparation the GRE is now over. I took the exam last Friday in Geneva. Almost the hardest part was staying calm before the exam started. My appointment was for 1pm sharp and on the confirmation letter there was a note asking me to be there at least 30 minutes ahead of that time. So being a conscientious fellow I was there at 12.20, but no one was in sight. The exam room was closed and the corridor deserted. The closer it got to 1pm, the more disquieted I became. Then came 1pm and still no one was in sight! I was starting to wonder whether they had forgotten me. Having traveled 4 hours to get to the exam I wasn't willed to just turn back and try my luck another day. So I decided to stick around. And then at 1.10pm someone arrived and I could start. So far as I can judge I'm quite happy with the result of the exam. I got almost full score in the quantitative (mathematical) section (790 out of 800) and a respectable result for a non-native English speaker in the verbal part (550 out of 800). The analytical writing essays went quite smooth as well, but it will take about two weeks for the results of those to come in.
So next up is the TOEFL which I'll sit next Saturday in Zurich.Labels: English, Master
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