Gsk

Well, life is very different working for a Pharmaceutical Company. For, starters I wear formal clothing. And, most of the people know little to no computer science. Which is good for me as I can learn a lot of Biology. My boss looks ok, would like to get my project done fast and move on to some research. Which is just fine with me! He doesn't seem to be a typical industry guy, he is more of an academic. He is Biology+CS major with a Ph. D. from UCLA with one year of post-doc experience. He worked for a while with a biotech startup before moving into a more stable job with Glaxo. He seems to know a lot about the industry and trends as such. He was telling me all about the drug development process, for the first time I feel like I am getting a real hands on perspective of what's going on.

The solution to the worlds' problems

--Common sense. Actually, any kind of sense would do.
--Most of the world's problems were and are caused by overinflated egos. Defend your position simply because it's your position. The real facts don't matter.

Semester Over Intern Begins

Whew! The semester is over. All the tension, anticipation, confusion has ended, the grades have been announced and I got A's. It was a semester where I somehow felt that I didn't do any work but to look back I learnt quite a bit. My algorithms course was good, the homeworks were a lot of work but I think it really cemented my understanding of the subject. I learnt some pretty interesting techniques like randomization. By introducing a little bit of uncertainity, you may get an answer that might be a little bit off, but you make things a whole lot faster in the process. I think I feel a lot more confident when I need to design an algorithm for a problem.
The other course that I did was Data Mining. I kind of felt that the course isn't too deep on fundamentals, it simply uses some existing statistical methods to analyze large amounts of data. A lot of it is similar to AI/ developing statistical models/ separating data statistically. I did some work in Bionformatics, it wasn't too technical a project but we are seeing if we can get some biological results and hopefully a publication. Data mining is an emergent area in Computer Science, so this course gave me a decent area of what's going on in it.
So, in conclusion it's been a decent semester- not too productive, not a total waste either. Hopefully, I can kick things up a bit next semester. I am done with most of my course requirements so I really want to take courses that interest me.
I leave for Philadelphia on the 19th of May with my internship starting on the 23rd of May. So, I have about a week to cool off before I leave.And, I might be heading back to India for a month in August so I am looking forward to that as well. I should make the most of it!