Initialization

So I spent two hours talking with the department head of computer science at my undergrad school, and the end result is that I know I'm going to go get a PhD.

I don't know where just yet, but I have a plan for finding out where would fit me best. It involves as its first step 3 months of literature search to determine which school has professors who publish in the areas of AI and neural networks that interest me the most. Even the literature search really excites me, which is probably weird, but a friend of mine told me recently that getting a doctorate is really a pretty weird thing to do anyway.

After helping with that plan, he gave me a lot of suggestions on how to get into the places I want to go, how to make contacts, lists of people he knows, the way some other students have made it into schools that they normally wouldn't be admitted to by working as lab assistants and other things...basically he laid it all out in a way that makes it seem possible - even for a guy who left undergrad never expecting to go back into academia and has been working in the corporate world for the past 4 years. And that possibility made me realize that I really want to do this. The research, the late nights working with other people as obsessive as I am, the 75-80% pay cut I'd be taking, all of it.

Coincidentally, for the first time ever I feel as though I have something truly worth blogging. This is a new thing, something I've never done before. It'll be long and hard and probably entirely different from what I expect. So I started this blog, and now I'm off to my old college library to start pulling all the proceedings of AAAI, IJCAI, IJCNN, ICANN, and ESANN I can find.