:: Mind Garten ::

:: Monday, January 19, 2004 ::

My Life at a Glance

I suppose I owe it to some people to periodically update them on what I've been doing with my life. I think it's been fairly interesting lately and hopefully you will too.

I'm currently at University of Southern California in Los Angeles studying for my Ph.D in computer science. I haven't been accepted to the Ph.D program yet, but I expect it forthcoming in the next month or so. Until then, I'm just a lowly Masters student.

I finished my first semester last December. Semesters here are 4 months long and you only have three per year. Fall, Spring, and Summer. I'm currently in the Spring semester which will end in May. I got all A's in my classes last semester and hope to do the same this semester. I don't really have any plans for this summer, but I'll wait and see what my situation is before making any decisions.

For the first time, I'm actually starting to worry about money. My savings is finally drying up and I don't have the funds to make it through this semester without finding a source of income. I've noticed that this has caused a general level of anxiety in my life and affected the quality of my sleep. Supposedly I have found a job working for a professor in his research project, but I don't know when he'll have the money to start paying me. This makes things uncertain. I also didn't get the job I was hoping for working in the lab I donated all my free time to last semester. The director of that lab just didn't have any money to give me. But I guess you don't always get what you want.

But not all is bad. I'm still having a lot of fun learning new things at school and working on projects that push the fringes of human knowledge. I'm still doing robotics, but I'm not sure what part of robotics I want to work on. Right now my research project is on self-assembly in space where robots are supposed to build large complicated structures in space without the assistance of humans.

I suppose the biggest news and probably shocking to some of you is that I am finally getting married. Now, this isn't a sudden hasty decision but has been in the works for about a year now. I just haven't mentioned anything about it to hardly anyone because that's just the kind of person I am.

So what are the details? I met her in the summer of 2002 when I went to Korea and taught English. She's a native Korean woman who was also working at the same school as I. We spent a lot of time together during that summer, but when I left to go back to the United States, I expected to never see her again. However, during email exchanges while I was in Oregon, we decided that we should get married since we were such a good match.

We are currently waiting for her visa to be approved by the US embassy in Seoul, South Korea. She will probably be coming to America in May sometime after school ends for me. After that, we'll be having a small wedding in Portland in which you're all welcome to come.

Technically, this is our second wedding since we had an unofficial non-legal wedding in Korea right before Christmas so all of her relatives could participate. Keeping it unofficial made the bureaucratic hurdles easier to jump through for obtaining a visa. Dates are not set yet since we don't know when the visa will come through, so I'll keep you all informed.
:: everist 1:02 PM [+] ::