Poster session

This past Friday, Stanford invited prospective students to campus for a chance to see the place and talk to some profs. It's really a recruiting event...Stanford wants to convince admitted electrical engineering graduate students to come here instead of Berkeley or MIT or wherever. Not ALL of the admitted students are invited, just the ones that the admissions people think are the most promising. For the record, Stanford didn't invite me to anything like that after I was admitted, but I went ahead and tried hard in school anyway. It seems to be working out. Also, for the record, I'm not claiming I could do a better job than the Stanford admissions people of reading though a pile of applications and predicting the best future student researchers.

Part of the day's events was a two-hour poster session set up in the main electrical engineering building, giving prospective students the chance to go around and see what kinds of work we do. My research partner, Alireza, and I put up a poster of our own. I was really very surprised by the questions we got. I expected to meet a lot of hotshots eager to impress me with how smart they are, but most people asked honest, useful questions about Stanford. How do you get into a research group? How do you get a project? Which advisors are the best? I was impressed.


Here is our poster. Alireza is taping it to a foam core board. I did a lot of the work, but he did a lot more. It looked really great.

Here is our humble corner of the poster session. These first four posters belong to

1. Drew, who is co-advised by Boris Murmann
   
2. Alireza and I, both advised by Murmann
3. Wei, again a Murmann student, and
   
4. Paul, from Simon Wong's group
   

At this point we're waiting for the throngs of interested students to appear. The turnout was fair.