Year in Elfred
I think 2003 has been of the most influential years
of my life. This has been one year where I have grown immensely as a person, had
a lot of good experiences, learned a lot and made a bunch of new friends. I have
lived in three different places, had a lot of fun in each and made a lot of
decisions about my life.
In january I moved out to Austin TX for the fall term of Extreme Blue. I had the chance to meet a lot of people some of which I still keep in touch with today. I worked on a pretty cool project that generated a few patent proposals, one of which is getting/or got filed. All of this was new to me, I’ve worked on a lot of cool stuff at school and on my free time, but nothing quite of this magnitude. I also loved the dynamic in the Austin lab, the Staff was great in my opinion and the extracurriculars were cool. Listened to some interesting brown bags on SW engineering practices, patents, hacking xboxes, grid computing, powerpc architecture and clusters.
I really enjoyed my time in Austin, I had the chance to catch a lot of bands I liked that would probably never go to Puerto Rico, including: Further Seems Forever, One Line Drawing, Coheed and Cambria, Sparta, Glassjaw, Dredge, Hot Water Music and Others. I also spent some time with my older sisters that I hardly ever see, which was also great. My Austin term ended in May so I had some time to get back home and spend some time with my family, friends and my now ex-girlfriend.
On May 31st I flew out to Boston for the summer term of Extreme Blue. Here I stayed at Boston University and met a whole bunch of cool people, the summer terms of EB are much bigger than the spring/fall ones so more interns are around. The first weekend a bunch of us went to see Finding Nemo, and it was downhill from there. Every (or at least most) Wednesdays we celebrated Extreme Wednesday, where we took an apartment and got trashed. I actually enjoyed my summer project more than the spring one. My mentors were more Savvy and although I had the quirkiest team possible, I enjoyed the antics. During the end of the summer we spent a few days at Armonk NY presenting our projects. My team presented to the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano. This was an awesome experience.
Upon returning to Puerto Rico I immediately got to school (a week late actually) , started working on my Grad School Applications and my research. I really hated my classes and they didn’t contribute much to what I wanted to do so they kind of took the back seat (my grades slightly reflect this), but on the other hand I got two papers published and a pretty nice offer from IBM, which I just recently decided to take. During the end of the year Ana and I broke up, that was posted already so I won’t talk about it here.
As I said, this year really changed me, I learned a whole lot from my projects and research. I started socially drinking again (For those out of the know, I stopped drinking in late during my high-school years). I really wish to thank everyone who has contributed to the events of this year, including but not limited to: My Parents, Ana, My Closest Friends Jose, Chiqui, Cesar and Bruce, The Austin EB Staff, The Cambridge EB Staff, Sprenks, Miguel, Joe (Betzie), BBJ, Peter, Daniel, The rest of the EB crew, Elliot, Joselito etc, etc, etc….
Thank you all
In january I moved out to Austin TX for the fall term of Extreme Blue. I had the chance to meet a lot of people some of which I still keep in touch with today. I worked on a pretty cool project that generated a few patent proposals, one of which is getting/or got filed. All of this was new to me, I’ve worked on a lot of cool stuff at school and on my free time, but nothing quite of this magnitude. I also loved the dynamic in the Austin lab, the Staff was great in my opinion and the extracurriculars were cool. Listened to some interesting brown bags on SW engineering practices, patents, hacking xboxes, grid computing, powerpc architecture and clusters.
I really enjoyed my time in Austin, I had the chance to catch a lot of bands I liked that would probably never go to Puerto Rico, including: Further Seems Forever, One Line Drawing, Coheed and Cambria, Sparta, Glassjaw, Dredge, Hot Water Music and Others. I also spent some time with my older sisters that I hardly ever see, which was also great. My Austin term ended in May so I had some time to get back home and spend some time with my family, friends and my now ex-girlfriend.
On May 31st I flew out to Boston for the summer term of Extreme Blue. Here I stayed at Boston University and met a whole bunch of cool people, the summer terms of EB are much bigger than the spring/fall ones so more interns are around. The first weekend a bunch of us went to see Finding Nemo, and it was downhill from there. Every (or at least most) Wednesdays we celebrated Extreme Wednesday, where we took an apartment and got trashed. I actually enjoyed my summer project more than the spring one. My mentors were more Savvy and although I had the quirkiest team possible, I enjoyed the antics. During the end of the summer we spent a few days at Armonk NY presenting our projects. My team presented to the CEO of IBM, Sam Palmisano. This was an awesome experience.
Upon returning to Puerto Rico I immediately got to school (a week late actually) , started working on my Grad School Applications and my research. I really hated my classes and they didn’t contribute much to what I wanted to do so they kind of took the back seat (my grades slightly reflect this), but on the other hand I got two papers published and a pretty nice offer from IBM, which I just recently decided to take. During the end of the year Ana and I broke up, that was posted already so I won’t talk about it here.
As I said, this year really changed me, I learned a whole lot from my projects and research. I started socially drinking again (For those out of the know, I stopped drinking in late during my high-school years). I really wish to thank everyone who has contributed to the events of this year, including but not limited to: My Parents, Ana, My Closest Friends Jose, Chiqui, Cesar and Bruce, The Austin EB Staff, The Cambridge EB Staff, Sprenks, Miguel, Joe (Betzie), BBJ, Peter, Daniel, The rest of the EB crew, Elliot, Joselito etc, etc, etc….
Thank you all