Academic Update

[Guest guest]

What up, everyone?

A while back, I posted here asking for thoughts/suggestions/experiences dealing

with the GRE. Lately, I've had a couple lurkers from the community ask me off

list how the situation ever turned out, so I figured I'd go ahead and just post

a general update here about my academic state of affairs.

Ultimately, I ended up *not* taking the GRE. The company that runs it was

majorly jacking me around in terms of accommodations to the point where it would

have interfered with my application to my desired PhD program. After discussing

it with the faculty, they decided to review my application without GRE scores.

As I said in the previous thread, this seems to be a growing sentiment in

academia that the GRE isn't very useful anyway, so they felt it was fine to just

consider the other pieces of my application.

Now the two pieces of awesome news. First, I was accepted into the PhD program

in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of

Washington [http://www.hcde.washington.edu/]! Totally epic.

Second, earlier this month, I found out that I was selected as a 2011 National

Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. The Fellowship (sometimes referred

to as a 'predoc') is the premier research award for students pursuing graduate

degrees in the US. I was selected for my proposed three-year research project

to build a new kind of natural language processing that will (theoretically)

improve speech recognition in human-robot interaction by developing contextual

knowledge of the environment.

So, starting this fall, I'll be beginning my doctoral studies and research

building the proof-of-concept robot. It's still kinda surreal to me...just a

couple years ago, this was totally not where I expected to be / what I expected

to be doing.

Has anyone here survived (or is anyone in the process of surviving) a PhD? Any

tips for a n00b? >.>

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