Thoughts, opinions and fascinating discoveries by Elliot, a student at USC
Most importantly, we ranked above UCLA 
The schools students most named were:
1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Princeton
4. New York Univ. (previously #1 for 3 consecutive years)
5. Yale
6. Brown
7. Columbia
8. Cornell
9. Univ. of Southern California
10. UCLA
Continue reading ‘USC Ranks as Top 10 Dream College by Princeton Review’
I mentioned to my friend Henry today that I’d like to be a professor, and he said he could see me as one. I think it’s a lovely job, with the benefits of being part of a university community– like I have as a student now– plus the opportunity to have a positive impact on students.
I listened to an interview with YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. It’s really excellent, I recommend giving it a listen. He mentions that being a university professor today is good practice for being an entrepreneur. If you think about it, professors nowadays have to be very entrepreneurial if they’re going to be good. They apply for research grants and have to sell other people on their ideas, to get new areas to explore.
Mark Redekopp proves to me it can be done and doesn’t take forever. He’s quite young (I think) and yet he’s a highly respected professor already. Continue reading ‘I Want to be a Professor’
Mike Garrett, Director of Athletics at USC, wrote an open letter to the Coliseum Commission which is intriguing and a little shocking to me. I’ve gone to only a few games at the Coliseum, and every time I noticed that it wasn’t kept up as well as it should be. It seemed outdated. Stuff was cheap. Things were broken. I’m sure this is still true today. The amazing thing is that it’s still so wonderful, even with all its extreme shortcomings. Indeed, the fans and Trojan spirit more than make up for any of the stadium’s problems. But Mike’s letter changed how I viewed the situation. Essentially, I had thought the Coliseum was basically USC’s. All of the problems that it has? USC’s fault. In reality, this is not so much the case. Here’s a brief excerpt from the letter. Continue reading ‘Keep the Trojans in the Coliseum’
Having interned with Google this past summer, I was glad to read that USC has unveiled a YouTube channel:
I’m inspired by Mark Zuckerberg. Is that a bad thing?
[Zuckerberg] began messing around with computers early on, teaching himself how to program. As a high school senior, at Phillips Exeter Academy, he and D’Angelo built a plug-in for the MP3 player Winamp that would learn your music listening habits, then create a playlist to meet your taste. They posted it as a free download and major companies, including AOL and Microsoft, came calling. “It was basically, like, ‘You can come work for us, and, oh, we’ll also take this thing that you made,’” Zuckerberg recalls.
He sounds just like me. I also began messing around with computers early on, and taught myself how to program. That was a long time ago now, but I still remember those days very well. As soon as I came home from school, I’d plug in my Cybiko and head to the Cybiko Forums to see what other developers were doing. I’d try coding some of the many, many ideas I had and quickly get stuck. So I IMed Greg Smith, the creator of the “B2C” or “Basic-2-Cybiko C” compiler. He would help me figure out what I wanted to do logically, put it into code, and actually write some real programs that did interesting things. I was hooked: finally I could create applications on my own– and very useful ones, too. I loved the fact that as soon as I announced a new version of my latest application, 10-20 people would be clamoring to download it. I’d get daily feedback from users of my programs, and I worked from their input to improve. That was a very early stage of programming for me, and I admit that my programming skills back then were severely lacking. Still, that’s how I learned the logic and syntax of BASIC and C, and lots of things about the practical aspects of how converters and compilers work. I learned how to work with variables of different types and to draw graphics on the screen. It was mind-blowing, and I loved it.
At the end of every semester, the University of Southern California has students complete course evaluations. These include reviews of our professors and teaching assistants (TAs). Typically, professors don’t take these seriously at all. They’re passed out in the middle of one of the lectures towards the end of the semester, and then the professor leaves for 15 minutes while we complete them. One student is designated to complete them and turn them in to the department. In other words, we don’t get much time to complete them, and students who don’t come to class don’t get to do them at all. Sometimes classes have fewer than 50% evaluate the professor and course.
I learned from Professor Zuckerman (Core 101) that they actually take course evaluations very seriously. According to him, every single one of them is read… and the scores have a direct effect on salary and promotions. This is a very good thing because students definitely have a better idea than anyone else of what the class is actually like. He advocates taking your course evalations home and turning them in later… this is something a vast majority of students aren’t aware they can do. In fact, Zuckerman requires it: he takes our evaluations upon submission of our final exam– and the evaluation is mandatory, good or bad. It’s anonymous and not grade-impacting, so it’s important for us to really tell the professors and the school what we think.
Computer science at USC is dying, and half of it is ITS’s fault. ITS is Information Technology Services here at the University of Southern California. I don’t know their history, but what I do know is:
An explanation of my complaints follows… now that I’ve written it out, I’m not so angry. But best to keep this online so I can record for memory’s sake how I felt at the time (though maybe not anymore).
I just got back from the JEOPARDY! 2007 College Championship here at the University of Southern California’s new Galen Center. Here’s an awesome little towel they gave us.. I taped my free admission ticket to it and hung it up in my dorm room in Marks Hall.
My roommate tells me nearly every day: “I’m dumb.” Sometimes he uses variants, such as: “I’m stupid.”
I disagree, but that’s beside the point. Clearly, this kind of perspectives are a matter of opinion. But I do have a point I want to make: every time I hear him say something to the effect of “I’m not smart enough” or “Nobody wants me” (which he does quite often), I think of Paul Graham’s talk at Startup School 2007.
Here’s a screenshot of the slide he used:
Here’s a photo of Paul and an audio clip of the relevant portion (quality isn’t the best, but it gets the point across; less than one minute):
For the past week or so, a lot of students and professors have been up in arms over the issue of the school’s administration reportedly ignoring the SCALE student group. They’re the Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation. While I don’t claim to know all the details, the essential issue is that they’re trying to stop USC from using sweatshops for the USC clothing that’s sold in the Bookstore. To do this, they’ve tried a number of protests. On April 10, they held a sit-in outside President Sample’s office in Bovard. I read that at one point, they entered the building and began interfering in order to get attention and try to open dialogue with the university. This has grown to be a big issue, even with a letter of complaint being published in today’s Daily Trojan and signed by a long list of professors. Well, I disagree.
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