I miss all the nerds (everyone) at Georgia Tech

Its the first game day of the 2010 football season, and I wish I was in Atlanta to cheer on the Jackets! I miss being in Atlanta, where most of my friends are. My parents only moved to the bay area 2 years ago so I hardly know anyone here. My high school friends are back in Phoenix and Chapel Hill.

Anyways, a friend of mine shared this on Facebook, and I got quite a few laughs from it so I figured that I would share it here... it reminds me of life at Georgia Tech! I remember being the only girl in my Intro to Electrical and Computer Engineering class and all the guys staring at me the first day when I walked into the room. The ratio of male to female students at Tech is still 3:1, with this year's incoming freshman class being 32% women (the highest ever!). But keep in mind that Tech is the #1 producer of female engineers, so all the other technical schools are worse off than we are...

I love nerdy jokes and comics like this, you'll appreciate it if you've ever taken an introductory computer science course. Luckily for us at Georgia Tech, we were ALL required to take introductory computer science courses either in Matlab, Java or Python (for all the non-engineering majors).

Image courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comics, as shared on Facebook by my friend Alex Cooper.

Staging.. its real and finally almost here!

I am actually going to Staging... and then flying to Ukraine from DC! I called the travel agency again this morning and actually got through in like a minute, which caught me off guard when the bright and chipper lady answered the phone. I was fully expecting an automated message and being put on hold.

Anyways, I asked the lady to try to book my flight through Atlanta and she couldn't do it. Apparently our flights are booked at reduced rates for government fares and all the fares for Delta flights through Atlanta were booked. I'm not that surprised, because both San Francisco and Atlanta are big airport hubs and I'm sure lots of government employees fly through there to get to DC.

So I'm flying from San Francisco to Chicago, then from Chicago to Washington National. I'm arriving at Staging a day early, at the Peace Corps' expense since I'm flying from the west coast. But thats okay because there are a lot of other people arriving early and maybe we'll get the chance to know each other a bit before the Staging conference-room sessions begin.

I'm sad that I couldn't get the connection through Atlanta to work, it would have been nice to see people one last last time before I leave for Ukraine.

One last thought - I'll be missing my 1st football season as a GT Alumni, and we're actually ranked in the preseason top 25 again this year. A friend of mine posted this article about hating on the top 25 on Facebook, and it cracked me up and reminded me that football season is right around the corner. Even though we lost Dwyer and a couple other big names to the NFL, hopefully we'll still do well. And maybe we will even finally win a bowl game, that would be super exciting! I can't wait to get back to Atlanta so I can join the Letterwinners Club at football games. I love meeting old student-athlete alumni :)

45 pages later

So after 14 hours of working on the senior design report on Wednesday, it ended up being 45 pages long. Plus another 18 page appendix for the User's Manual. I submitted it to our advisor for review on Thursday morning, then she returned it to us today at midnight. Not bad for a professor who has to review these final reports from 4 different senior design teams. Now I just have to make the 30+ changes that she suggested, and format the whole thing again. I hate when charts and graphs make the text chunks really awkward or leave large gaps on the page because Word formats them to overflow onto the next page.

But good news! Our spring T-day is tomorrow, where our football team has a scrimmage game and we fill the stadium with loyal GT Football fans. Our team won't be quite the same without our superstars Dwyer, Demaryius "Bebe" Thomas and Derrick Morgan though... at least 2 of them went in the 1st round NFL draft!