admitted.
Monday, October 29th, 2007Today, I received a letter of acceptance to graduate school at the University of Illinois.
Last fall, almost a year ago to the day, I sent an email asking Prof. Steve Lumetta if I could speak with him during the upcoming week. Come Thursday, I found myself sitting in the weekly 5pm staff meeting with the usual suspects: Greg, Kirsten, Ali, Danny, and everyone else. In retrospect, I stayed with ECE 190 in large part due to the number of high-quality acquaintances I made as a lab assistant for that course. The meeting adjourned around 6pm, and I found myself standing in the hall with Prof. Lumetta or “Steve”, as he always insisted that we call him.
“You wanted to talk to me?” We sat down in his office.
For the next 45 minutes, I was engaged in the most direct, hard-hitting talk I’d had in a very long time. As anyone who has dealt with him would tell you, Steve has a very distinct way of dealing with people that is academically colloquial, yet demanding in a quasi-parental way. Steve is the most intellectually honest person I’ve ever met, which depending on the circumstances, can be a needed breath of fresh air, or the last straw which pushes someone over the edge on a bad day.
That Thursday, he did not mince words about my future.
“I think I might be interested in graduate study here.”
“Really? That’s great to hear. What’s your GPA?”
I told him my GPA.
“Dave, that is too low. What are doing?”
“Well, I’m doing a lot. For one, I’m trying to help teach this class. I’m also trying to run the finances of a 101-person organization, which requires that I go around collecting about 2000 dollars from 101 people. I’m also trying to find a job…”
My phone rang.
“Dave, you have a problem. When I first met you, you seemed very bright to me, but you have a tendency to overcommit to things.”
“I’m not going to argue that - but every single person I meet here, every graduate student, professor, everyone, also seems to be really busy all the time.”
“Well, that may be, but how can you expect to get anything done when people are dinging your phone all the time? You have to learn to say ‘no’ to people.”
“Well, it’s hard. When I say I’m going to do something, I really mean that I’m going to do it. But then stuff comes up, and I end up practically killing myself to deliver on all the committments that I’ve made. How do you manage this?”
“When someone asks me if I can do something, I default to telling them ‘no’, unless it’s something very important. Either way, I don’t tell someone that I’ll do something for them without taking time to think through what that committment entails. You have three semesters teaching this class, but you’re still a lab assistant. After your third semester doing this, I spoke to Wen-Mei about the possibility of lettinng you teach a class, but we agreed that you probably wouldn’t put adequate preparation into putting together the material to handle giving a lecture yourself. So we chose Greg instead of you, even though he has less experience.”
…
“So what can I do at this point? Is this just entirely hopeless? I’ve interviewed with a bunch of companies, and that’s going nowhere. Should I just give up? Go crawl under a rock and die? What are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting that you get your act together. I can get you into graduate school, but you have to convince me that it’s what you want to do.”
“And how should I go about that?”
“Get A’s next semester. All A’s. Go get a 4.0 and then I’ll be able to tell the committee that you had gotten bad grades, but there was a step-change in your work ethic and attitude toward school.”
“I understand.”
…
“So what are you interested in anyway? If you want to get into graduate school, it helps to have a specific idea of what you’re going to study.”
“Well I’m interested in engineering, but more of the operational issues than developing new products.”
“Have you considered studying security?”
After that conversation, I was probably the most depressed I had ever been in my life. I was in the middle of an unsuccessful job search, and having been rejected by Amazon. Accenture, Citadel, Morgan Stanley, DRW Trading, Infinium, DE Shaw, Microsoft (where I had done a successful internship), and more, hearing that I probably wouldn’t be able to get into graduate school was the last thing I needed.
I finished that semester with a 2.6. This academic train wreck was largely due to the amount of travel I was forced to do as part of my job search. I was also taking a very demanding class load, with ECE 411 and CS 418 both requiring major projects, and the fact that I still lived in the Evans Scholar house didn’t help, either.
So I decided to study computer security.
Over winter break, I spent a lot of time reading about computer security. I spent at least a week straight reading articles about everything from encryption protocols to buffer overflow exploits. It was also over that break that I registered this domain, and unsurprisingly, I also started using GPG to sign my email. I wanted to take a class in security, so I registered for ECE498IA, “Introduction to Information Assurance”, taught by Nikita Borisov. I decided to take a look at his work, and found that he had published a huge body of research on privacy-enhancing technologies, encryption, and network security. I recall staying home one night during our ski trip to Crested Butte that winter, and reading Nikita’s paper on Off-the-Record messaging.
The semester after break almost killed me. I took five classes: German, Programming Studio, Fundamental Mathematics, Computer Networking, and Information Assurance (Nikita’s class). I again was taking two project classes. Stephanie had also decided to study abroad in Vienna, which further complicated things as her time was seven hours ahead of mine. Fundamental mathematics was a majors-track math course that concentrated in formulating correct formal proofs of various mathematical ideas. Programming studio required completion of a project every week which typically took 10-12 hours to complete. Computer Networking was taught by a sadistic PhD graduate student who expected the entire class to share his love of the topic - spending 30-40 hours on a two-week project wasn’t uncommon. Additionally, my partner in networking was a graduate student who considered 4pm-12am “normal sleeping hours” and would regularly call me at 11:30pm on Friday nights to come to the lab and help him. On several Saturdays, I spent 12 straight hours in the networking lab, leaving only to get lunch and dinner. I didn’t even go out most weekends because I was so tired and sleep-deprived that I just wanted to spend the weekends in bed - but I couldn’t, because I had 3 meal job shifts on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night. Most weeks, I spent 6:30pm-12:30am Monday-Thursday programming. It was hell.
German and Information Assurance were my two saving graces. German was the most fun class I’ve taken in a very long time, and was a welcome release from the day-to-day pressures of engineering education. When I traveled to Germany and Austria over spring break, practicing my new German skills with native speakers was incredibly fulfilling. Something as simple as saying, “Ich möchte nach Flughafen gehen” - I would like to go to the airport (to pick up Stephanie from her flight from Austria) - was incredibly satisfying. I went out of my way during that trip to speak as much German as possible, and even conversed (or tried) in French, with a guy we met in an absinthe bar in Berlin. Being able to speak two foreign languages, even at a rudimentary level, is absoutely awesome.
However, taking Information Assurance was what ultimately got me on track for the future. I loved Nikita’s lectures. He’s one of the most friendly professors I’ve ever met and is incredibly knowledgeable about a vast array of topics. He was responsible for the “off the record” protocol implemented in Pidgin (formerly gaim), worked to crack 802.11b, and is currently working on various issues in electronic privacy. One day in the course, Nikita advertised a new “ITI Internship Program”, a 10-week summer program designed to get undergraduates work experience.
I applied to the program and was accepted. My graduate career began the day I was selected to ITI. I worked over the summer to improve the state of network intrusion detection, and met a ton of interesting people in Nikita’s group. I was offered the chance to follow up this work during the school year, and gladly accepted.
I finised the semetser with a 3.87.
And now, I have an office at CSL. I’m part of the security reading group, and our research group (”Hatswitch”) has recurring meetings on Mondays to discuss recent research. It’s been a pleasure to work with Hatswitch. The people are absolutely first-rate, and I love my project: research in developing a language and system for vulnerability-specific filtering.
I hope that my readers can find inspiration in the story of my path to graduate school. This has been the most challenging life of my year, but I’ve accomplished a lot and met tons of interesting people.
I harbor no delusions about how I got here, and it was not alone. I owe debts of gratitude to the many excellent people that have been a part of my life over the past year. Foremost, I’m thankful for such a supporting, caring girlfriend that has been a continuous source of encouragement, even when times were rough. I’m also thankful to Steve Lumetta, for setting me straight a year ago. I’m thankful to Nikita for having faith in me, and for Bill Sanders, for his guidance on our project and his continued high professionalism. All three of these gentlemen go far beyond their professional duties in providing guidance to students, and they all wrote me recommendation letters which no doubt decided my application. I’m also thankful to the many friends that have provided conversation and support, in particular my roommate of 3 years Dan Garcia, and various members of the “Nerd Herd”. Kurt, I still feel really badly about hitting you in the face on the ski trip last year; I hope time can heal that.
More than anything, I’ve learned that there is no force so great as ironclad conviction to a goal, no matter what that goal might be.
Thanks for reading.