It's Saturday!

Yay, it's Saturday! Which means that I have time to do my work... and procrastinate by blogging!

This weekend has been candidates' weekend here at the UNC Chapel Hill Computer Science Department. That means everyone who was accepted into the department next year was invited to come for free so that we can convince them that this is where they want to go. The official program is basically all of the professors who might be interested in new students talking about the research they do. The current students like the make the visit a little more fun for the candidates.

That's where I am involved. I started my involvement by getting up early in the morning on Thursday so that I could drive to the airport and pick up two candidates before my first class. They are staying in the (very nice) hotel across the street from our department, so I just had to take them back to Sitterson. Of course I can't park anywhere near Sitterson during the day, and it was time for my class to start, but Chi was kind enough to meet me there, drive my car home, and take the bus back to school since she didn't have to be in class then.

Then Thursday night the candidate fun continued when Chi and I got to take three of the candidates out to dinner on the department's bill. We went to Elmo's, a local hippie southern food restaurant (mostly southern food, but they're in an extremely liberal city so they also do things like hummus platters and vegan meals). That was a lot of fun, and it felt like the candidates enjoyed it and got a sense for what it is really like around here.

Yesterday the candidates were stuck in Sitterson listening to talks and visiting with professors all day. I ate dinner with them (free pizza) but then they had more meetings. Later in the evening there was a party planned for the candidates with beer and the UNC basketball game, but Chi and I were tired and we were with Peter who is not really comfortable around alcohol consumption, so we stayed at Chi's place and watched Battlestar Galactica and the basketball game.

The basketball game was very interesting. UNC kinda sucked it up in the beginning and we were down by about 10 points at the half. But if you've ever watched UNC basketball, that may not surprise you. By about 12 minutes left in the game, we were down by 12 points. Then it happened. Like it always does. They got tired, we got energized. USC didn't score for the next 8 minutes, in which time UNC scored 18 points to be ahead by 6. We then had a couple of crappy possesions, but USC wasn't doing too hot at this point either, so we ended up taking the game by 10 points. Haha to the high school kid who used to be in first place in the facebook brackets but had USC winning the entire tournament.

Now today I have volunteered to show off my apartment to candidates so that they can see how UNC grad students live. The apartment's kind of a mess though, so I should go clean up a bit.