Saturday, February 7, 2009

the transition stage - part 1

in the last post, i mentioned how i'm gonna start being way more active here in LA before i leave. i listed 4 events for that 1 week. well, i did all of them except for the art exhibition. the bball game was great. i randomly saw my roommate and his gf there, and we all enjoyed the game. we beat berk by like 16 or so?

sadly, i didn't do anything on campus this past week. my excuse: operation graduation. i've been reading papers and just doing a lot of thinking about how i'm gonna really approach my problem. i have 4 weeks left, and i must write 20-40 pages in that time, too. so, it's starting to get scary.

okay, here comes the good news! i finally received my official offer from MIT Lincoln Lab! they really want me, and they made me a very gracious offer. the best part is that i'm also very excited, and MIT was the dream ever since 2001. i'm not going to talk anymore about the whole dream stuff, as i've already blogged about it in the past. just know that it feels very good.

okay, here comes the bad news. nasa/caltech's jet propulsion lab is also making me an offer! they put in a request, and it's just up to HR to approve. their small group is undergoing a huge funding decrease due to the space industry pushbacks. but, my job would be research/development of AI for the mars rovers and all of the deep-space satellites. very fascinating! i'm the first person they've hired in 2 years, and only 2nd in 5 yrs. i'm extremely flattered.

i classified this as 'bad news' because i always said it would be too hard for me to have to pick between the two. out of all of the places to work in the world, they are my #1 and #2 picks. yet, i just didn't know the ordering of who was #1. they are both identical in many respects (are FFRDC's tied w/ good schools, located in fun cities, amazing research opportunity--instead of being 100% programming, fascinating nature and application of the work, etc). during the last 3 months, i've been thinking about it a lot, and i've finally picked who i want to work for. i won't say now, though :) i'll keep it as a surprise for a bit. anyway, that's my big news. i feel very very grateful/fortunate/blessed/lucky.

don't forget to do the poll, please.

i will leave you w/ a video i saw this past week:







4 comments:

  1. congrats, man. aren't you going to let your blog readers decide which offer to accept!? It's only fair.

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  2. yea, well, a few posts ago i had a poll whereby i asked everyone which job they'd prefer. i believe everyone selected 'google' or 'other' nobody selected JPL or LL. but yea, i was asking for you guys to pick a job for yourselves, not for me. my bad. next time :)

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  3. Just making sure you've seen: UCLA Graduate School Deadlines

    Do you REALLY have 4 weeks? Deadlines in grad school are nuts...just make sure you follow all the rules or you won't have a degree in March!

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  4. anonymous, thanks for the heads-up. i definitely didn't know about that. who are you?

    ReplyDelete