But 317 has a name. It's called algorithms. The class they referred to as 365 is stochastic processes. Hey, those sound pretty cool. How did you like them? What did you study? What was your favorite topic? Those were questions I repeated to each of those five people from UT, and they were happy to explain. It wasn't easy. Without traditional icebreakers (which I now realize are surprisingly effective), I spent the first week in complete silence, speaking only to my group members and saying hello and goodbye to my roommate, who was sometimes in the same lab. But with a lot of effort, I eventually broke free of that habit.
Making friends through academic work was actually a rather foreign concept to me. Given my rather abysmal class attendance last year, I didn't make any friends in class. Nor is making friends in class really the same as making friends at work - in class you work on the same problems, and everyone benefits from it. At work, you all have different projects with very different backgrounds, and as the project progresses it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up.
But I kept trying, and in all modesty I'm proud to say I succeeded. I was re-introduced to compressive sensing. I learned about information theory and routing. Probably most importantly, I was coincidentally introduced to the idea of matrix completion, which turned out to be a key idea in my own research.
At some point, conversations move from academics to hobbies and interests. While this is highly questionable in the work environment, I have to admit it happened rather frequently. We found out that we all liked frisbee; we played some foosball (that was rather unfair to them); we read that really terrible review of Avatar: The Last Airbender together. We were quoting it for days.
Near the end of the program, at the poster-making workshop we were forced to attend, we shared a room with another group of students (not in our program). We had just come back from lunch, we were in a good mood, the presentation was foolish and full of material we already knew. After the speaker was done and had left, we were given time to 'start our posters.' Not happening. We joked around, and soon after someone had to leave the room because he couldn't catch his breath from laughing. Of course, the other group was hardly amused - they left after about 5 minutes. To them, I apologize.
And so at our final dinner on the banks of Lake Austin I was filled with mixed emotion. It had been a lonely summer in so many ways. So many movies passed me by, and I had no one to see them with. I was 24 hours away from going skating with my friends back home, which I was certainly looking forward to. But I knew I'd miss this place, and these people. I was sad that I would no longer walk into lab and find Josh sleeping across two chairs, which is surprisingly comfortable. I'd miss Sammy's workaholic attitude and complete immunity to the distraction known as 'The World Cup.' There would also be no more minesweeper showdowns with Zach. I'd even miss our discussions on networking and combinatorial group testing.
When the coordinator asked me, "So, Ved. I'm curious. What did you think of Austin?" I had a lot to say. I talked about the big foosball scene. I told him how weird it was that when I was ordering at Chipotle or Subway the employees tried to hold actual conversations with me. I complained a bit about the weather, and mentioned the beautiful Zilker Park. I didn't say what I was really thinking.
Fortunately, I don't think I had to.
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