As of today, I'm officially an American!

It was quite an eventful day yesterday. My high school research mentor emailed me for the first time in a few years. He wanted to finish writing up the work we did end of senior year at IMSA, and then I would present the paper at a conference in Florida next January. That sounds like a good plan to me. I also took the GRE yesterday. Perhaps I would have preferred the paper version rather than the computer-based test. The writing and quantitative sections went fine. However on the verbal, it did not occur to me that I should pace myself, and so I ended up having to guess through tons of questions at the end of the 30-minute period for a 590, OOPS. Fortunately, CS grad schools don't pay much attention to verbal scores. If the writing scores come back fine as I expect them to be, I won't bother taking it again.

Also there was an interesting theoretical problem I encountered at the end of the Yahoo internship. I talked to Prof. Umans today, and we didn't find anything exactly like it. Since I've already made some progress on it, I'll probably write a paper on this problem too. I guess publications come in bunches, as the fluid dynamics paper from last year is also being reviewed right now for some journal. I just might recover in time to compile a competitive grad school application.

In 10 hours or so I'll be heading home to Naperville for a week. I think I really need more time to totally unwind from the last 5 months or so. It has been a difficult period for me, as chronicled in my private entries. I don't regret having worked all summer instead of chilling out, since overall it was a good internship and I did create a fallback. Well in general I just try not to regret much. It's usually more productive going forward than backward. I am however still ambivalent about going home. Again, the specifics will have to go into private posts.

All week there's been International Student Program events going on. Tonight was the ISP game night. Since I was the only regular member of the chess club on campus, I volunteered myself to give a 15-board simul to all comers. I ended up with about 20 wins, a draw and a loss. The two games I didn't win I had two pretty poorly played pawn endgames. Still it went better than I expected, considering I haven't played much for about a year. It was pretty funny that everyone thought I was a chess master. Well I'm not. I'm only an expert. At one time I planned to make master by the time I graduate, but that has taken a backseat to poker and bridge. I guess I was discouraged by how much harder it was to progress at the expert and above level compared to when just starting out. In any case, I'm glad everyone there had a lot of fun tonight.

That's it for now. I will be writing a variety of papers next week. You can probably guess which ones.