Skimpy clothes and summer plans

Resolution #8: I will finish the *&@$ skirt.

So, the good news is that there are still all these scholarship and internship opportunities available for the coming school year/summer. The bad news is that all the deadlines seem to be within the next month, and I don't know who I can ask to write recommendation letters on such short notice.

Oh, and it's 1:00 a.m. and I can't sleep. But that's not a *new* problem.

DIMACS/DIMATIA, IBM Watson or Almeda or Austin, MSR (or plain vanilla Microsoft), Google, MIT-LL... there are so many cool things I could end up doing next summer. It's not precisely that I wasn't aware there were cool internships and research positions out there; it's that before, I didn't have the hubris to think I would ever be selected for them.

Now I know better.

IBM-Austin might in fact be the most promising right now. While I don't know whether I'll like IBM overall as much as I like Microsoft, the experience may build a better foundation for graduate school and will almost certainly be looked upon more favorably by graduate school admissions committees.

I wish I knew whether it was necessary to put grad school above life, but I don't.

If nothing else, I'm sure my mother would turn cartwheels at the Austin job description, particularly the fact that it's publication-oriented.

And any way you slice it, the possibility of an APS/IBM scholarship on top of the regular internship salary helps.

We shall see, though, if I actually get letters for any of these things.