Curricumum vitae
curriculum vitae: a short account of one's career and qualifications prepared typically by an applicant for a position
Caddy, Ravisloe and Idlewild Country Clubs
Summers 1997-2003, Homewood/Flossmoor, IL
Chasing golf balls down fairways alongside the most degenerate coworkers imaginable. If you want to know what it was like, read Jim Paul's What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, which gives a pretty accurate description of a caddyhouse, completely with gambling, underage drinking, and everyone searching for "the angle" to swindle someone out of a dollar. I saw people cheat at cards (marked decks, dealing off the bottom), players "foot wedge" their way out of bad lies, and my personal favorite, our caddymaster running a golf cart into a fence, while trying to steal a box of hats.
The best thing I got out of this job, in addition to a lot of off-the-books cash and a crash course in vice, was a fantastic 4-year, all expenses paid scholarship; that part was great.
Homewood-Flossmoor High School
1999-2003, Flossmoor, IL
Graduated in the 3rd percentile of my class, from a nationally-ranked public high school. Like many Chicago-area high schools, the feel was more "liberal arts college" than "one-room schoolhouse": 3,000 students, an Olympic-size pool, and classes spread across several buildings.
As a large high school, HF offered a wide range of educational topics: the menu included small-engine repair, undergraduate-level economics, swimming, and C++. I had many great teachers; a few inspired lifelong interest in the subjects they taught.
Joshua Brown: English/Debate
Josh Brown was HF debate's head coach. As teenage policy debaters, we dug into congressional procedure, feminist internal relations ("Fem-IR"), and Michael Foucault's postmodernism, in intense multi-day competitions that spanned entire weekends. Many of these tournaments took place out of state, involving travel to Michigan, Indiana, even Atlanta and Boston. I owe debate in general, and Josh in particular, a huge debt of gratitude. Almost everything I know about speaking, structured argumentation, how to do research, and a whole lot more—civics, law, nuclear weapons, mental health, foreign policy, American secondary education, how to be a responsible consumer of the media, and how to listen well— started here, cutting cards until 10pm on weeknights, or at tournaments.
William Jastrow: Band
Mr. Jastrow ran the bands program at HFHS. In addition to being a high school band teacher, he took 100 of us to China: 北京 and 西安. We traveled just seven months after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. At the age of 17, I was left with a lasting sense of awe and curiosity about China.
Brian Dvorkin: Physics
Brian Dvorkin taught college physics: Newton's laws, the equations of motion, moments of inertia, optics, and wave-particle duality. Even at 7:30 in the morning, I was happy to come to class. He loved to put on a show; I still remember puzzling over why a red laser, aimed through two parallel slits, created a pattern of rectangular boxes on the wall.
Pamela Pinnow: Economics
Mrs. Pinnow taught the basics of supply and demand, factor productivity, substitutes vs. complements, and aggregate supply/demand. She took a handful of students to the Fed Challenge, a policy competition held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where students suggested open market policy to a panel of judges.
Anita Dellaria: English
The model of a great high school English teacher. She introduced us to Michel de Montaigne's essays, and guided my budding interest in philosophy, particularly the Platonic dialogues, and John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism (very useful for impact analysis in policy debate).
William Trudeau: Calculus
Taught us limits, l'Hôpital's rule, the chain rule, the fundamental theorem of calculus, and how to take an integral.
Shari Cohen: Biology
As a freshman, taught us about DNA, nucleotides, RNA/DNA synthesis, and gel electrophoresis. Mrs. Cohen's biology class was the main reason I took the more difficult molecular and cellular biology class as my basic science requirement at Illinois, rather than the easier integrative biology option.
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
BS, Computer Engineering: 2003-2008
A proud standard-setter of public, ABET-accredited, Carnegie-R1 engineering education. This place taught me how to work.
Major areas of study:
- Math: Calculus (4 semesters, through vector calculus), introductory analysis, differential equations, linear algebra, statistics, discrete math
- Basic science: physics (3 semesters), chemistry, molecular biology
- Computer organization and design: TCP/IP networking (2 semesters), operating systems, assembly, computer architecture
- Electrical engineering: Electricity and magnetism, semiconductor physics, signal processing
- Other: German language, gender and women's studies, engineering law
Activities:
- IEEE Board: Served on executive board of student chapter of IEEE. (All but one of us now live in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
- Evans Scholars: Full tuition and housing scholarship. Served on executive board as treasurer, overseeing a 100-member house and $250,000 budget.
Kitchen help, various group residences
2003-2007, Champaign and Urbana, IL
Mopped floors and washed dishes for lunches and dinners. I worked at Gamma Phi Beta, Tri-Delta, and Armory House while studying at University of Illinois. The job had its moments but overall it was pretty bad. I did this all four years during college.
Intern Software Development Engineer in Test, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft
Summer 2005, Redmond, WA
Intern in the BizTalk group. BizTalk was a business process modeling tool intended to let semi-technical business analysts define "orchestrations", sequences of actions with embedded conditional logic. I was responsible for the "notification adapter", a BizTalk component which emitted messages into the Windows Event Log. This was my first experience as a professional software developer; I learned as much as possible about XML, C#, and Windows development in general, something I revisited time and again in subsequent years.
This was my first "career" job; it was awesome.
Intern Software Developer, Baseball Info Systems
Summer 2006, Skokie, IL
Developed the publishing pipeline for the 2006 edition of the Bill James Handbook, a printed book of baseball statistics. "Moneyball" is the story of A's general manager Billy Beane using our book's methodology and data to assemble a winning baseball team on a shoestring budget. The pipeline was a huge pile of Office macros (VBA) which rendered FrameMaker files by querying an Access data store.
After ahead-of-schedule completion of the book, I spent the remainder of the summer building Infield-Outfield-D, a graphical application (GDI+, WinForms, C#/.NET) for generating "spray charts", showing the selected major league player's historical batting tendency. The tool was sold to several major league GMs as a defensive positioning tool.
Coming from Microsoft, this place was awful. I worked in an office that was both dingy and loud, supervised by a bozo IT manager who knew nothing about software. After spending the previous summer working in one of the world's preeminent software firms (Microsoft), I was now facing criticism for wearing shorts to work—in 100-degree Chicago heat—as a non-client facing employee seated 15 feet from a loading dock. I gained a lasting appreciation for the use of data in baseball, and swore off ever again working in technology development in Chicago.
Research Intern, Information Trust Institute
Summer 2007, Urbana, IL
Spent the summer researching vulnerabilities and exploits, supervised by Prof. Nikita Borisov. Learned a great deal about Ruby and the Metasploit framework. Hundreds of hours spent reading bugtraq, defective source code, and CVE reports. Presented a poster on this work at the conclusion of the summer, which became the start of my master's thesis.