Hiring freeze

I did some looking around on the Internet today and found reports of a hiring freeze at numerous companies. That seems to include John Deere, where I applied. I probably won't be hearing from them for quite some time. That's unfortunate; I'll need to think about other plans.

Back to class, kind of

Today was the first day back from break, but with entirely online classes. I only had one class today, but tons of other meetings and things to handle. The class I'm on staff for is mostly alright for now. We released another (pretty easy) segment of the semester-long project this evening, so I'll keep an eye on that tomorrow.

Thesis submitted

This afternoon I submitted the final version of my thesis. I'm now back in the Quad Cities for spring break and will hopefully return to lab work next week.

UTK visit day 4

This morning all the GST visitors, hosts, and some faculty went to brunch at a nice place with a great view:

Some mountains near South Knoxville

The program director said they would start sending offers around mid-March, so I'll probably hear something within two weeks. After the meal, my host showed me a bit of downtown Knoxville and then dropped me off at the airport.

I managed to do a little useful work while waiting and flying, but I still have a lot to catch up on.

UTK visit day 3

I got up early this morning to go tour some of the bioinformatics- and genomics-related facilities on the main University of Tennessee campus. After lunch, the actual interviews were held. They had matched each visitor up with a faculty member doing related research. Each 30-minute conversation went at least reasonably well, especially the first. That professor is doing purely computational work, though it is very interesting and I might want to look more into her lab.

After interviews, we got to attend the GST retreat, a poster session and mini-symposium held in partnership with the biochemistry/molecular/computational biology department. I saw many interesting posters and spoke briefly with a handful of faculty. The two departments had dinner together - a lot of people! In a few minutes I'll go to a GST grad student social event, the last part of the day.

UTK visit day 2

Today was full of tours. In the morning we were shown select parts of the (extremely large) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Their Spallation Neutron Source was offline for maintenance, so we were able to visit the facility. A beam of neutrons produced by hitting mercury with accelerated protons powers many different lab instruments.

Part of the top floor of the SNS

We then saw the Summit supercomputing facility, which provides a huge amount of computing power mostly in the form of GPUs. The sentence "we're installing a 40 megawatt line" was spoken. We visited several labs, both at ORNL and the University itself. UTK has a large focus on agriculture even in the Genome Science & Technology program, so they have sophisticated greenhouse facilities.

At dinner we were joined by some GST faculty. Tomorrow we'll have the official interviews.

UTK visit day 1

I got up at 3:55 AM this morning to make sure I could board my flight in time. I had scheduled an Uber to the airport ahead of time, but for a few minutes the app was trying to schedule my trip but no drivers were online. (To be fair, it was 4:30 AM.) Fortunately, one driver did eventually appear and picked me up as planned. The original flight was through Dallas to Knoxville, but due to weather in Dallas the connecting flight would have been delayed, so I was reassigned an earlier connection into Chicago. (Good thing I got to the airport early!) After a few hours of flight I safely arrived in Knoxville.

A current graduate student in the program - my "host" - picked me up from the airport. We ate lunch together, featuring some awkward silence because I'm very quiet. I was then dropped off at the hotel, where I spent the afternoon doing some work. I took a break to walk around outside a little. Campustown is very nice and clean. I saw this interesting scene:

Could be a Myst scene. What's up with the devices in the middle of the drainable river?

In the evening all the recruitees and their hosts went to dinner together. I think the original plan was for some faculty to be there as well, but none were. I got more comfortable with everyone and overall had a good time. Tomorrow we're all off to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Hackathon day 3

After a nap of ~2 hours this morning I freshened up and went back to work on the hackathon project. There was just one remaining problem: the web UI for our application no longer connected to the server. Fortunately it got solved pretty quickly. A change to the data structure had made the UI's requests invalid, which was made more difficult to debug due to the environment we ran in.

With the work time over, we went to the atrium of one of the event's main buildings to display the project. A steady stream of people talked to us and seemed to like the project. At the closing ceremony we were awarded second place in the judges' selections. We left satisfied and exhausted. I'm now going to try to catch up on the sleep.

Hackathon day 2

I've now been awake for about 20 hours. Yesterday and overnight we made a lot of progress. I'm still not used to the language this project is written in, but I've been getting a little faster. I made a system to send email and then extended a teammate's code to support authorization. Submissions will close in a few hours.