It’s been 3 weeks here in New York, and things just keep getting better and better. I’m taking 2 classes this semester, which meet for a grand total of 4 hours a week. In addition to that, there’s a weekly meeting with my whole group, and a 1 on 1 meeting with my advisor. Those are all my fixed appointments per week, leaving me with an incredibly amount of free time–such a great feeling. My classes are both great (advanced machine learning and physical simulation for graphics), and they have virtually no homework, but a lot of reading. The reading is very interesting and I’m really enjoying reading those papers.
My advisor has given me an initial project to work on (I’m working with a master’s student also), which might or might not become my thesis problem, but it’s fun to work on, regardless. The project can loosely be termed an image compression problem, or perhaps a problem in “representation of images.” I find that even though I have so much free time, it goes by so fast because of all the reading, and the lots of time I’ve been spending working on research. Even though my roommate bought us a huge tv, and I bought myself a really nice new computer with a very expensive graphics card, I have spent almost no time playing computer or ps2 games, or watching tv. It’s good, I guess, although somewhat disappointing also.
My apartment here is pretty good, although apparently it’s a little bit farther from the CS department than most other grad students (cs dept. is at 120th st and my apt is on 108th). I’m pretty much all settled in except for the fact that I don’t have a bed yet (soon, hopefully, I’ll get one…). The neighborhood is a little shady at night, so I’ve already had some “interesting” late nights outside my apartment. It’s a fairly good size apartment (by NY standards), and there are tons of places to eat and small shops to buy random stuff (and groceries, etc.) right around here, so it’s convenient in that way. There are two different subway lines within 5 mins, so it’s nice to be able to get around most of manhattan without more than 1 exchange between lines.
New York is a great city (as everyone who’s ever lived here had told me). Here are the main things I’m loving about it so far:
- You see people everywhere walking around! This means so much to me, as every other city I’ve lived in since Bombay has not been like this. Atlanta, Chapel Hill, and Seattle were all OK, but you wouldn’t see that many people out and about walking (mostly people drove everywhere).
- You can get around very comfortably without a car. The trains rule, and they run 24 hours.
- You can get food anytime of day or night. Finally, vampires like me can find food at 4:30 in the morning. And not bad food, either.
- Concerts. I’ve been to 3 in my 3 weeks here. One more coming up next week, and then several in october. It’s heaven for me, musically, and frankly, a bit overwhelming. The only downside is that there’s enough of an audience for all the shows, including the obscure artists I listen to, that often shows sell out before I get tickets. I’ve missed 3 concerts already because of this.
Because Rob and my cousin are both here, I hang out with them every weekend, and perhaps because of that, I haven’t really made many new friends here yet (although hopefully I will soon).
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