Grad School
First off, I’d like to thank God for the snow. He made this a 2.5 day work week. How awesome. And there isn’t even snow out right now! I feel like a little kid partying at home cuz of a snow day. I got so much done already and my roommate isn’t even awake. LOL. Of course we both woke up at 5 only to go back to sleep.
I’ve been thinking alot about grad school lately. This is the first time I’ve considered it an option. I always thought I’d just start working after I graduate. Now that I know what field of CS I want to get into, I realize that I don’t know enough. Grad school would definately give me a push but there’s two problems. First, I need to get into grad school. My options are limited b/c there are few schools I want to attend and this is complicated by the second dilemna, money. I’m already in “school” for 5 years. Grad school will probably tack on 2 more years. There are two options to me right now for some $$. First is the DOD Scholarship I hear it’s pretty easy for “us” to get this since we already have a security clearance and work for the DOD. Next is my work. I can get all my tuition paid for if I can find an office willing to. Back to the first problem of getting into a school. I don’t mind taking the GRE’s tho I’d rather not. The biggie is letter of recommendations. I can easily get ones from my employers but from professors? Do they not realize that ALL my CS courses are like 150-200 people big and there basically NO interaction with our professors? For the DOD scholarship, I need three. WTF? Where am I gonna find three professors to write me one? The biggest mistake I made was not preparing for this ahead of time. I would have done research and gotten more involved with professors or whatever. But I didn’t know I would want to go to grad school one or two years ago. Can’t they just look at my GPA and let me? Any advice is greatly welcomed. Right now I’m looking at UIUC, John Hopkins, and Maryland.