I am a computer engineering student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was accepted a few months ago into the program through a transfer program at a community college. I in fact still have my acceptance letter on my refrigerator. However that's not really what this post is about, something completely awesome happened to me that has pretty much secured my future as a computer engineer.
Back at my parents' house, one of the neighbors is an Atmospheric Science professor at the U of I and he's known me ever since I was but a little boy. A few months back during the summer, my mom asked me if I wanted to go to this charity fundraiser she had bought tickets for. The fundraiser was an auction/food/alcohol/barn dance sort of thing held at a large crop farm with lots of expensive farming equipment and really fancy and clean heavy equipment hangar. I agreed to go. Said neighbor was at the same fundraiser and we started talking about various things, computers, science, projects he's working on etc. He told me he was looking for some ECE students to help him with this big new NASA funded project he'll be working on and realizing that I was an ECE student gave me his number and said to call him so we could talk more about the position.
A few weeks pass and I go to his house and talk about the kinds of things that would be expected of me and it seems like we both agree that my current skill levels would be a good foundation for the position. After a few months of him battling with HR to get the hourly position approved, his colleague emailed me asking me to write a C program to solve a downsampling problem with a large matrix. I wrote the program and sent it to him, he and my neighbor were so impressed with the quality of it that they offered me the position without ever officially interviewing me.
Now I'm working on a NASA funded project called the Terra Data Fusion project which is creating a product that consolidates scientific data from 5 different weather instruments all residing on the Terra satellite spacecraft. The final project will be a little over a petabyte of data. Because there is so much information, we need to use a supercomputer to process it and repackage it. Turns out, my neighbor (now boss) is a Blue Waters supercomputer professor, and he recently gave me access to the UIUC in-house Blue Waters supercomputer, the largest supercomputer housed at an academic facility. I now have this RSA token key that allows me to connect to the computer through SSH. In a school of many thousands of undergrad students, I'm one of only a handful that have access to it. I'm VERY honored and grateful.
Basically, none of this would have happened if I said "no" to going to the fundraiser.
Lessons I've learned:
- Say yes to as many opportunities as you reasonably can
- "It's not what you know, it's who you know." So, make connections with people.
- The butterfly effect is crazy
- Grades matter, but not as much as knowing the right people.
- Be excited about learning, and learn things on your own. A lot of my programming skills were refined because of my own personal interest, not because of classes.
tl;dr Was accepted to the school of my dreams, got a job as a student hourly worker processing weather satellite data, have access to largest academic supercomputer in the world.
Submitted September 01, 2016 at 12:12AM by UnclePutin http://ift.tt/2bJVB06 EngineeringStudents
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