It's that time of the year again (time for my semi-annual post to Faldara). After quals (in January) and an initial month of internship applications, the semester was mostly about The Master's Thesis of Ultimate Awesome (TMTUA). I also managed to squeeze in a visit home (in March, shortly after my previous post), a couple of paper submissions, and the occasional class attendance. The end result is a Master's (apparently Wes has my diploma, or so he 'asserts') and a summer job at Intel, which is where I am currently.

As is my custom when catching up on several month's worth of Exciting Graduate Student Life, I will now skim. For the full effect, imagine me talking about my MS thesis throughout all of the following social events.

The theme of this past month seems to have been 'internships, and little else.' After we got back from San Francisco, I filed all the requisite forms to get work authorization for the summer. Since then I've done four phone interviews with various researchers in my field, and a week or so ago I spent the (entire) day doing on-site interviews with Microsoft in Redmond. It's been sort of intense, but the news so far is good: I have one official offer and possibly more on the way. It is somewhat of an embarrassment of riches.

After my first phone interview with Microsoft, they (flatteringly) invited me over to Redmond a few days later. This was a little hectic, given that I didn't get my itinerary until a day in advance. One of my flights -- the very first one -- promptly got canceled, but United was kind enough to drive us from Charlottesville to Dulles instead. By the time I made it from Dulles to Seattle to Redmond, I was not in a great state. Fortunately, my 7 straight hours of interviews didn't start until the next morning...

I finally got around to 'selecting' and formatting my remaining pictures from the California Trip. The trip was split up roughly as follows:

• Thursday—Drove from Charlottesville to Richmond in the Virginia-equivalent of a blizzard; flew from Richmond to Philadelphia; ate hotdog in 30 seconds while running to the gate post-final-boarding-call; drove from San Francisco to Davis in The Gigantor (rental car) during rush hour.
• Friday—MURI meeting; presented my work on SQL injection vulnerabilities. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the Helix research group (quite literally).

I have no hopes of catching up on six months worth of festivities, so here's the highly abridged version instead; here's what I did during the last 4.5 months:

• I took classes: math, theoretical crypto, and security.
• There was a paper submission around mid-November. As an exercise to the reader: which two photos to the right were taken within an hour after we submitted the paper?
• After scrambling to catch up on class work, I spent most of December and January-to-date studying for the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam. That was earlier this week. The written exam took a grand total of 15 hours, leading to near-blisters from writing.