Surfin’ USA

Presentation done

So this morning I gave my talk about the paper I submitted to the conference proceedings. Like everyone else I was allowed 20 minutes for the presentation, followed by 5 minutes for questions and comments. I managed to finish the first part in well under 20 minutes, basically since I had over the last few days removed a number of details and sidenotes from the slides, so that’s good. I then received some questions from the experts which mostly went like this: “So how do you think technique XYZ would perform for the problems at hand, any intuition?” to which I mostly answered something along the lines of “I don’t really know much about that.”

Anyway, I think all in all it went quite well. And it was definitely an interesting and rewarding experience to be up on that stage in front of some of the brightest heads in the field. Moreover I was approached by a few people afterwards, asking me about some details — so that’s also a good sign, since it shows my work was not completely irrelevant. Oh, and I had a friend take some pics with my digicam, which I will download and maybe post here once I am back in Irvine this weekend. But for now there’s more talks to attend and coffee breaks to enjoy…

Bonjour de France

Good morning to everyone from the Atlantic coast in France, where I’m currently attending a conference in Nantes. I was on the road for roughly 24 hours (flying from LA to London, transfering between airports there and then flying to Nantes), so yesterday night I was pretty exhausted. Then add the effect of the time difference and you can imagine how I felt once I had arrived here.

After a good night’s sleep I feel a lot better today, though, so I am now sitting in the conference foyer at the local “Cité des Congrès”, ploughing through the weekend’s emails and news. Today there are only a couple workshops on the schedule, of which I attend none, thus, as the weather is very nice (sunny with some light clouds), I might go on a little walk in the city this afternoon. I’ll also need to give the finishing touch to my presentation, but that has time until Thursday — and it’s mostly done anyway.

Welcome week

This week Mon-Thu it’s welcome week here on campus. This is mostly geared towards freshmen (i.e. first-year undergraduate students), but still I took a walk through the park on Monday with the welcome fair situated there (where they happened to offer free lunch )
Previously I had attented the introduction for new graduate students at my department, but there we were only given information and you didn’t really get to know the other students. In the afternoon a reception event for international students took place, which had some entertainment acts in it, which was quite nice. But again it was more of an information session and nothing was prepared to meet other new students. I guess that will just have to happen over time then.

Meanwhile I’ve met with my advisor and discussed my presentation for the conference in France that I will attend next week. She had some suggestions, so now I’m working on the presentation. My conference attendance (I’ll be gone 9/23-9/30) also implies that I will miss the first week of class, which means I’ll have to catch up on the stuff I miss on my own. But I think a paper in a conference is well worth it.

First pics from campus

Well, it’s nothing special so far, but due to popular demand I’ll post some first pics here.

As I might have mentioned to some of you, I’ve found a place in one of the on-campus graduate housing communities, which you can probably best think of as a little village. It has different kinds of houses with varying sizes of appartments, even some families live here. I personally live in a 2-room appartment with a greek graduate student. We share a kitchen, living area and the bathroom while each of us has a small room for sleeping and studying. My flatmate has some furniture in the living room, but my room is still unfurnished. Hence I’m looking to acquire some used furniture at the moment, but it seems there are a lot of opportunities for this on campus, so I’m not worried.

Close to our housing community is a supermarket, a bank, restaurants and even a hairdresser’s shop — all still on campus. So I guess you can really say the university is like a city of its own (did I mention we have our own campus police?).

Currently I’m spending most of my time walking around campus, taking care of the initial paperwork. Among other things I need to apply for a Social Security Number and then submit a couple of tax related forms, so I can start getting paid by the university. Next week will then bring all the official introduction and welcome events, so I’m looking forward to that as well. At the moment it’s still rather quiet with not many students around.

Update: Several of you have asked for my street address. I won’t post it here where anyone can grab and abuse it, but I’ll happily provide it after you email me or leave a comment to this post (with your email address).

Arrival

Just a short heads-up to let everyone know that I got to California and especially Irvine alright. The journey went quite smoothly and at around 2pm local time (23:00 CET) I finally set foot into the southern Californian sun.
Subsequently I made my way to my room on campus and where I unpacked and went for some initial shopping. I also took some pictures of my room and the area here — but right now the jet lag is catching up with me, so I’m getting ready for bed. I will write some more later, as time permits.