Entries for March 2006

Blog Stats and Such

On a whim last night I checked out my Case blog stats and was stunned. Now, I know that I just started posting again here in March, and I know that some of the EECS classes are using the blog system for data mining, but a jump from 553 to 1369 unique visitors still seems pretty extreme. Are other bloggers at Case seeing spikes like this? Or, perhaps more importantly, will it last? ;)

Taking a look at the search terms like I have in the past suggests that a lot of it may have to do with the the vote of no-confidence and Hundert's resignation. Although there have been 22 searches for "nicole sharp" and one for "nicole sharp case" (i.e. 7.5% of the keyphrase searches that turned this blog up), 33.2% of the keyphrase searches had something to do with a combination of the following: President Hundert, the vote of no-confidence, Hundert's resignation, and Lawrence Krauss. (Watch my stats continue to rise as I use these words!)

Other popular general topics include:


  • Graduate school (10.2%)

  • Space and the Space Shuttle (6.3%)

  • SOURCE in general (2.4%)

  • MIT (2.4%)

That last one continues to amuse me to no end. Googling for "mit nerds" brings up one of my entries as the second result. Because people on the Internet don't read very closely, I've actually gotten e-mails from people asking how much I like studying at MIT. This would be part of why I have that "about" link sitting at the top of the page. I keep meaning to write an entry purely about who I am so that maybe I'll stop getting e-mails from people asking about MIT and whether I can pass their idea about how to fix the space shuttle on to NASA. I'm an undergraduate, people!

Such interesting things happen when one has a blog...

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Research Highs

After nearly ten months of equipment problems and set-backs with my SOURCE/Capstone/senior project, I hit a milestone today. I put together all the little pieces of programming I've done to automate the mapping experiment and tested it. And it all worked!

In brief, the LabView program accepts user input as to the desired circular motion to execute and the number of measurements to make along the way. It calculates where it should be stopping to take measurements, then executes the first of many moves, pauses to take data, does some fairly hefty calculations on the data (see screenshots 1, 2, and 3), saves that data, moves to the next point and repeats the process.

At the end of all of this, I have a file containing spatial, temporal, and statistical information for every point in the flow that I map.

I'm absolutely thrilled that everything worked smoothly the first time I ran the full program. I guess that means that I did a good job programming all the little pieces along the way. This means that I'll be going into the lab tomorrow when fewer people are trying to go in or out of the lab (and thereby messing with the airflow) to spend a few hours mapping out the ion plume. At the end, I should have some nice visuals for my research poster at the SOURCE Symposium on April 20th.

(Speaking of SOURCE, how is it that I have two news items on the front page of their site? Maybe they're falling behind on updating that?)

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Graduate School Decisions

The time has come to give the final run-down on graduate school applications. Here's the list of schools and responses:

It was pretty shocking to get accepted everywhere and to get four financial offers. How I managed to do so much better in applying to graduate schools than I did applying to undergraduate institutions is beyond me.

In any case, I went through and carefully considered each offer, both financially and in terms of what would be expected of me at each school. I also spent quite a bit of time reflecting on each of the four schools I visited and whether I felt I would fit well with the departments and their research interests.

In the end, I decided to accept Cornell's offer. I won't be tied to any one research project until after my first semester, but there are at least two professors in the department that I would be thrilled to work with. I also have to admit that Cornell was the most exciting of my school visits. I really got into talking about the research with professors and students there, and the atmosphere of the department was one I felt comfortable in. I didn't spend as much time exploring the campus and Ithaca as I might have liked--Charlottesville was very much a factor in favor of UVa--but I'm confident that I'll enjoy my five years there.

It was a tough choice, but now that I've made it, I'm ready to start looking forward to this summer when I get to go back to Ithaca to find an apartment. I can't wait to get out on my own. In some ways, it's like going back to those exciting couple of months before college started. Some days I get up and all I can think is, "I can't wait to start graduate school!" We'll see if I still feel that way in, say, November.

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Hundert's Resignation

So it seems that the vote of no-confidence ordeal has been bad enough that Hundert has tendered his resignation. I don't know what's going to happen now. I have my suspicions, but mostly I find myself breathing a sigh of relief over the fact that I'll be leaving Case after this May.

That's something that I never wanted to find myself saying.

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Graduate School Status

Given all the work and excitement that have gone into my graduate school applications, I feel like I really should have discussed the topic of what I'm doing after Case already, but I suppose that I've been a little too busy living and keeping my head above the water to spend a little extra time on recording them. In any case, I know that there are a few people who read this who won't have heard where I applied and all the news, so I'll share.

I find such things easiest to handle in an unordered list, so that's what you're getting. I'm serious when I say "unordered" here. This isn't some kind of list of ascending or descending preference.

  • Duke University
    • Status: invited to visit, visited (9-11 Feb), no formal acceptance or financial offer yet
    • Thoughts: I enjoyed my visit to Duke a lot. The campus is gorgeous; the people were good; the women's basketball game was absolutely fantastic and really made me nostalgic for the U of A games I used to attend when I grew up in Arkansas. Unfortunately, the research didn't really grab me.
  • University of Virginia
    • Status: invited to visit, visited (23-26 Feb), formally accepted, fellowship offer on the table
    • Thoughts: I wasn't considering UVa all that seriously until I visited. Not only are UVa and Charlottesville great, I fit in very well with both the department members and the other prospective students. The downside is that I still haven't spoken with the professor there who would be my advisor if I matriculate; he was out-of-town when I visited. I'm expecting a call from him this week. I've actually been offered multiple fellowships on top of the department's base graduate student stipend, which is very flattering. The irony here is that I was waitlisted when I applied to UVa as an undergraduate.
  • University of Michigan
    • Status: invited, upcoming visit (16-18 March), formal acceptance, no offer of financial aid yet
    • Thoughts: Michigan's aerospace program is quite highly ranked. In fact, I surprised a lot of people when I turned down their undergraduate program in favor of coming to Case. At the time I felt like Case's program was better suited to what I needed. We'll see if Michigan's program is more like what I need now when I visit next week.
  • Cornell University
    • Status: invited, upcoming visit (9-12 Feb), formal offer of admission and of financial aid
    • Thoughts: Cornell is definitely the most prestigious department to which I applied, and I was absolutely floored when I received my acceptance letter from them. There's a professor there who I'm very interesting in meeting this weekend because I feel like his lab group may be a good match for me. I haven't decided where I'm going yet, but just about everyone else has declared that I'll be going to Cornell. I'm not sure whether the thought delights or terrifies me more.
  • Case Western Reserve University
    • Status: accepted, no financial aid
    • Thoughts: I admit it. Case was my back-up. I also, frankly, couldn't consider it too seriously because the professor I'd be interested in working with is also the one pushing me steadily out the door.
  • University of Notre Dame
    • Status: nothing yet
    • Thoughts: I wish my mailbox weren't consistently so empty.

So that is the current state of affairs in brief. I have to say that it feels really good not only to know for certain that I'll be going to graduate school next year but to know that I have choices about where I'll be going. Spring Break is going to be resarch between a sandwich of graduate school visits, and, with some luck, I may get to squeeze in a chance to see some high school friends. I've got a friend at Cornell and several at Michigan, and, since my family doesn't live in Michigan anymore, this will be my only real chance to see them for an indefinite amount of time.

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More on Hundert and the Vote

As a follow-up to my entry yesterday, I found this Plain Dealer editorial on the vote of no-confidence issue to be both informative and well-argued. I think it may be the first piece I've seen that's substantially laid out the reasons for discontent in the university. Like the author, I feel like Case would benefit more from having Hundert at the helm with a few hard-earned lessons than trying to bring someone new in at this point.

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