Midterm Review

More than half of 2007 has passed, and it may be a good time to review my resolutions for 2007.

• Do well in MAT357 Real Analysis and ECO100 Economics (2006 Spring)
• I worked very hard for MAT357 and the result turned out to be good, and I indeed learned a lot from the course. Working on a homework for a whole weekend was a pain during the term, but somewhat memorable in retrospect. Specials thanks to Jay, Sheng, and Andrew for all the enlightening discussions.
• ECO100 was pretty easy and I seldom attended lectures after the first test due to the low entropy rate in lectures. But I did get a good understanding on the basic stuff and result was satisfactory too.
  
• Status update: DONE.
  
• Perform well at Altera
• It was a memorable 12 months. I learned a lot, worked hard and had lots of fun there.
  
• Status update: DONE
  
• Take GRE
• Status update: DONE (awaiting AW score for final approval)
• Have a good summer research experience
• The work in Professor Kschischang's group is very fun and so far I have made some progresses. But more to be done before any real achievement.
• Status update: IN PROGRESS
  
• Get my driver's license
• Status update: TBA
  
• Pick a good design project topic
• I choose Universal Portfolio, under the supervision of Professor Wei Yu. We have a very strong group, consisting people with strong technical or business background. I am very optimistic about our final result.
• Status update: IN PROGRESS
  
• Do well in the 2007 Fall
• I am looking forward to it!
• Status update: TBA
  
• Make profit in Forex trading
• Nope, no profit so far. And my trading is in a dormant state as I don't really know how to make profit consistently. I may resume this when I get more time and more experienced.
• Status update: DEPRECATED
  

In summary, so far not bad. But there is at least one more important task --- apply for graduate schools and I will work hard on it too.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Tentatively, I am done with GRE

Yes, I am tentatively done, and will be finally done with it if my AW score turns out to be OK.

I went to the test center at 1, and after certain registration stuff, I left all my belongs to a locker , went into the test room and started the exam.

At the beginning, there was a whole bunch of crap such as how to use the mouse, keyboard, etc. Then the test program started to gather certain information about the examinee. Interestingly, when asked to input my school name, the University of Toronto did not appear in the Canadian school list, while others like Waterloo, McGill or even Lakehead, Laval were all there. So I skipped that page.

Soon writing started and the issue topics contained one that I had practiced before, so I chose that one. The argument was something full of holes and very easy to attack. Hopefully I have done well in the AW part.

Then the Verbal part started. It seemed the so called GRE Blue Bible (寄托蓝宝书) has a pretty good coverage on the words for the Computer-Based Test, at least after working on the book, I knew most of the words in today's exam and made some educated guesses for the rest. The reading was kind of tough, but manageable. I ended up finishing the section 3 minutes earlier.

After that was the Quantitative part, which mainly consisted high school level math questions. I was quite careful when answering those questions as generally Chinese people get full marks in this section and there is no way to recheck answers after you submitted them.

When everything was done, there is an voluntary test section and not interested in writing one more issue, I skipped that after taking a glance at the topic.

Soon the final score came out after I confirmed that I wanted to report my scores. The score for the Quantitative part was 800, and the score for the Verbal part was 190 marks above my general expectation of 600. The result was definitely satisfactory and I have to admit that I am pretty lucky today.

Feeling relieved, I walked back home. It is good that I am done with GRE for now and can focus on something more important and fun -- summer research. Hopefully my next blog post can bring some more exciting news.

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Life is an opportunity to do something.

Google Calendar: Graduate School Application Important Dates

My friend Tom has created a Google calendar that has important dates (mainly deadlines) for graduate school application in the field of EECS for Fall 2008. If you are interested, you can subscribe it here to view all the events (given that you have Google Calendar):



And everyone is welcomed to add events to it. Just email me and I will add you to the editor list. The list currently only contains a few deadlines so there are still much room to contribute :)

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Life is an opportunity to do something.