Humanist

Dr. Comer, TCP/IP team and tenured professor at Purdue University, has been on leave from Purdue to work as Vice President of Research and Development at Cisco Systems this year. Yesterday and today he’s been back at Purdue giving talks and lecturing for some courses. Last year he was my professor for Computer Architecture (in which he also wrote the book) so I know him fairly well so I’ve been going to all his talks. His talks have been “sold out.” Today he filled the biggest lecture hall in the CS building to the point where other distinguished professors had to sit on the floor (just to give you an idea of how big Comer is at Purdue)!

His talk today was on “Lessons Learned While Working on the Internet” and it was arguably the best technical talk I’ve ever been too. It’s very motivational to see, first hand, how well someone’s done for themselves in the same field I’m in. That leads me to the topic of this post: “what path do I intend to take in this field?” Or more narrow: “to go to grad school or not to go to grad school?” I want to go to grad school and get a Ph.D. but I worry that I am not cut out for that type of thing. Most of the professors at Purdue are theory based researchers (or at least the professors I’m familiar with) and I’m only now taking my first real theory course (I’ve taken intro to Discrete Math etc. but those don’t count). What if I’m not good at research?

I guess this is what most people go through when they are deciding what major to pick in their senior year of high school. I never went though that process because I’ve always been set on Computer Science/Engineering. The only choice I had to make was what school to attend. Now that it’s time for me to decide whether I want to pursue further education, I’m going through my process a bit later than more people. I guess I’m a “late bloomer” for indecisiveness.

Another variable to further complicate my job/research search is that VMware has shown interest in me for a summer intern position. VMware is right down my alley in terms of the type of programming/business I would like to pursue. I still have one year of CS undergraduate work left, but, this summer I will either get an internship or do research. The internship would be better for going straight into the job field and research would be better for continuing in academics. I am hoping I will learn enough about both faces of the coin to make an educated decision.

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