Graduate School Restarts

UNC Chapel Hill's Iconic Old Well

I haven't blogged about my graduate school experience for a while but a lot has happened. I just spent last summer at the eBay Research Labs. I will write more about my work at eBay later. I will also be attending a research conference in Sidney on December. But the more important thing going with my graduate life is that I transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to finish my doctoral dissertation.

Academic research groups in US higher education institutions are like small start-up companies and they are too subject of acqui-hires by other schools. I'm moving along with my research group from the State University of New York at Stony Brook to the flagship school of the state system in North Carolina to continue on my research. I was counting the number of times that I have moved in the past 10 years and it is certainly more than a dozen times. But this is the time when I have felt the most nostalgia about relocating to a different place. People say that time goes faster after you are a teenager but those 4 years on New York State were a century for me. I learned so much academically and from life, I learned to cook, I learned to drive and wear many other hats. I'm above all extremely grateful that I could meet a lot of the people I met. Had I not met some of these people I would just not be complete today. I lived so much in so little time. I like to look back at all the excitement that I had when I started this blog Graduate School Starts and so I named this post Graduate School Restarts because I'm keeping this same excitement and curiosity for science for this last lap in my graduate school journey.

Montauk - Far far away on Long Island

It seems I like pictures of lighthouses. I think I got a better picture here than the one I took of the Fire Island Lighthouse, also on Long Island. I was actually working with pictures of lighthouses some time back on a vision project so I have seen at least in pictures a lot of lighthouses in several shapes and colors.

Montauk is the easternmost part of Long Island and therefore the easternmost part of New York State. Iconic place in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the first movies I watched after the Dumb and Dumberer-stage of one of my favorite actors: Jim Carrey. Another serious movie I like from him is the Truman Show, of which I made a reference in my earlier post about mosaics (Starry Night Mosaic Art).

Long Island has many niceties that I haven't yet explored, another movie that is coming this year and portraits some of the forgotten glamour of Long Island is The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Mr. Gatsby. I will try to visit a couple of those mansions from the 1920's before the end of the year and post some more pictures.