COLLEGE

YAY! Spring break, here I come. After I defend my four years of high school and explain wh I should be allowed to graduate, then BAM! Done for the next two weeks!

College search continues; I found out that UC Irvine won't tell me how much financial aid they'll give me until I enroll there!!! Outrageous... I mean, if I wanted to buy a car, and the dealer wouldn't tell me how much the car cost until I agreed to buy it, I would walk away right then and there.

I guess I have to REALLY want to go to UCI to agree to something like that...And I don't really want to go to UCI, so I'll have to take some more time before I decide.

MOAR NEWS LATERRRRRRR!

I apologize upfront for the long break between posts, but I find it hard to come up with a meaningful post without a large block of time to plan out what I'm going to say (spontaneity comes to me in short, unplanned bursts).

Anyway, I figure its been a while since I've updated you all on college stuff, and a lot has happened since my trip to Chicago. Here's the current status of all the colleges I applied to:

----Illinois Institute of Technology----
Cost of attendance per year for (2006/2007): $35,000
Financial Aid Supplied per year: $17,500
Will I go here? Most likely, not; Chicago's weather was just too cold for this California-native, and the cost is not as low as a couple of the other schools currently are, after financial aid.

----Texas Christian University----
Cost of attendance per year for (2006/2007): $31,500
Financial Aid Supplied per year: $9,850
Will I go here? Nope. I applied because of a cost- and essay-free application, but the amount of financial aid they're offering isn't high enough to get me excited about possibly attending.

----University of California, Riverside----
Cost of attendance per year for (2006/2007): $22,307
Financial Aid Supplied per year: $16,051
Will I go here? Well, its up there. UCR is placed at about #3, with MIT and UCI ahead of it. The amount of financial aid is very nice (it'll cost me about $6000 a year to attend with the aid I've received), but I've heard the atmosphere (the planetary one, not the ambience) is kind of, well, smoggy. If I don't get a similar amount of money from UCI and I'm not accepted to MIT, I may end up going here. I've read UCR has a budding nano-technology division, though, so its not all bad :D

----University of California, Irvine----
Cost of attendance per year for (2006/2007): $20,296
Financial Aid Supplied per year: Unknown
Will I go here? This is my second choice for a college. I've been accepted, but I haven't heard anything from them in terms of financial aid. UCI did show up on a list of the top 50 Engineering colleges in the country, and I've heard a lot of good about the school, so I'm eager to see if this college will live up to its hype.

----University of California, San Diego----
Cost of attendance per year for (2006/2007): $20,112
Financial Aid Supplied per year: Unknown
Will I go here? Possibly, just found out today that I got accepted. I was accepted as a Bioengineering major at Revelle College; I wonder if this major will get me into nanotechnology? It would be worth it to go to UCSD if it got me closer to my goal than going to UCI would. Anyway, its up there, at about #4.

----Massachusetts Institute of Technology----
Cost of attendance per year for (2006/2007): $44,600
Financial Aid Supplied per year: Unknown
Will I go here? No, rejected

Geez, I know its a lot of reading, but there ya have it. As you might have guessed from the names of the schools I applied to, I'm shooting for either a degree in EE (Electrical Engineering) or CE (Computer Engineering). My main goal is to break into the nano-technology industry, so I picked these majors hoping that they'll lead me to my goal. If you guys know of any better major to pursue, let me know! I'd hate to work on a major, only to be directed away from the future I want to pursue =

Tomorrow, I find out whether or not I've been accepted to MIT!!! The tension is so palpable right now, you could tear it in twain with minimal effort. I'll find out bright and early tomorrow morning, so as soon as I find out, you'll know :D

Wish me luck!

[EDIT]
So yeah, I checked out my admissions decision to MIT, and:



Here's the letter I received when I logged into their system to check my status. I'm a little down, but I figure there's always graduate school =|

Well, its been almost a week since my trip to the Illinois Institute of Technology, and I figured you were all curious as to how everything went. To refresh your memory, I went to Chicago to interview for the Camras Scholarship, which is a possible full ride. I don't know if I've received it yet, though; I should know in about a month. So, here goes :D

The Beginning

Well, the trip started off normally enough. My mom and I got up at the crack of 3am and headed off to Lindbergh Field, in San Diego. My first plane was scheduled to leave at 6:45, so I was fine time wise. I arrived at the airport, checked one of my bags, and headed to the gate to wait...I realized I'm going to ramble on about minutia, so here's the abridged version:

Got to airport, plane was delayed, got into LA as my second plane was leaving, managed to get onto another flight not too later, arrived in Chicago around 5pm CST, waited outside in ~40^oF weather, hitched ride to IIT.

Some notes of interest, the Chicago Hub IS HUGE! My god, I've been there once before when I went to South Carolina a couple years ago, but I was still impressed by it this second time through (I found out later that the Chicago airport is so large, it has it's own zip code!) Secondly, forty-degree weather is really cold...yeah, it sounds obvious, but when you've lived in California all your life, any temperature below 60^oF is cold.

Here are a couple pics I took on the plane ride in:


Chicago is the flattest place I've ever seen...


And there, rising out from the center of "the flattest city I've ever seen", was the Downtown district!!

Moving on...

So I arrived at IIT at around 6pm after spending an hour in rush-hour traffic, checked in, received a folder with some event information, and met my host for the weekend. Strangely enough, his name was Matt and he was into baseball, too...who'dve guessed? We walked over to his dorm, located in this building:



One of the first things that hit me was the random clutter that lined the walls and doors. From amusing anecdotes, to this popular scene from Southpark:



Here's a picture of the room I sought shelter in for the duration of my stay:



The other Matt is the one in the green shirt; he was a pretty cool guy, working on a Computer Science degree. He happened to live in the dorms, so I was removed from many of the other Camras candidates, who stayed with the Fraternities. It wasn't all bad, though; the dorms were set up in an "H" pattern, with rooms forming the legs of the "H" and a bathroom connecting the two, and the guy in the other room was relaxed and easy-going. The dorms had an interesting setup, and I think that if I went, I'd go for the dorms.

Interview Day

Luckily, I my interview for the Camras Scholarship wasn't until 1:30pm on Saturday, so I was able to sleep in a bit. Before the interview, I headed over to the common area to get some food:


The big silver tube was actually a tunnel for the train system that ran through Chicago. The common area was underneath it.

I had a bit of time to kill before I had to check in for my interview, so I walked around the common area, snapping pics of whatever seemed interesting:


The hallway was so orange, everything in side it was...orange...yeah


Inside the common area, there were some important IIT figures on glass dividers. From afar, they looked like this ^


Upon closer inspection, though, we can see that the images were made out of many small stick figure pictures. Apparently, IIT is all about stick people...


The bathrooms were orange and very Modern, with some peculiar floorplans

The Interview

So after perusing the grounds for a bit, I had my interview. It wasn't too bad, a one Mr. LoCiCero of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department interviewed me. He was a strange one, a bit squirrely, but he seemed nice enough and we proceeded with the interview.

The questions he asked weren't really of an academic nature; they were questions involving me as a person, my leadership qualities, what I plan on doing during and after college, what alternate majors I'd pick, things that would show them just how ambitious a student I would be if I were to go to IIT. I answered all his questions as best and as confidently as I could, putting my silver tongue to good use and trying to talk myself up without bragging...too much :D

The Rest of the Day

With my interview over and it only being 2pm, I decided to walk around the entire campus, checking everything out. These pictures weren't in any real order, so I'll just describe each one individually:


I went to Pi Kappa Phi's ice cream social Friday night, after I got into town. They made some killer ice cream Coldstone-style, with some really weird throw-ins...


The backside of the Dorms, where I stayed


I really like this shot, its a picture taken under the train tracks looking towards the common area.


Apparently no one heeds the signage...


OMFG a squirrel!! I don't see many of them where I live ;)



IIT has baseball, so of course I checked out the field!


ICE?! Until now, I'd only ever seen it inside freezers... :D


Uncanny, how you can look down a street in any direction and see for miles on end


Tired and cramped in the my Economy-class seat, I was glad to be on my way home

So there was my trip to the Windy City. One hundred twenty thousand dollars rested on the 30 minutes I spent in Prof. LoCiCero's office; kind of puts everything into perspective, if you think about it. I guess I'll find out how persuasive I was sometime in April, when I hear back from the school.

I'll be sure to let you know what happens next :D

Yeah, so I got back from Chicago around 3pm PST (I have to work out the problem with timestamps reporting the server's time instead of my time; there's a 3-hour difference between them = ). I would have posted about my trip today, but a client is demanding all of my time, and thus I find myself slaving away to make a meager living.

C'est la vie, I suppose...though it shouldn't be



*Sputter* *Cough* Damn, foiled again! Well, faithful readers, more tomorrow!

I'm heading to Chicago tomorrow to go interview for a Cmaras Scholarship to Illinois Institute of Technology. I was accepted, as some of you might know, and I was offered the full-ride-scholarship under the condition that I go to the campus to interview for it.

I'm going to try and take lots of pictures, and when I get back on Monday, I'll post some pics and let you all know how it went!

Wish me luck!

I've been busy recently, working on a friend's website. This particular friend of mine decided recently to go into the T-Shirt business, and she came to me seeking some web design work. I agreed to help out, and over the course of about the last 3 days, the framework of Volo Designs made its debut! You can see the site here, at http://www.VoloDesigns.net.

Bear in mind, there's a lot more work to be done, but the foundation is there. The front end is of my friend's design; I simply put it to HTML. There's a bit of PHP I threw in that was able to work only because my friend had (thank god) learned sometime earlier how to name similar or related pictures with the same prefix and different suffixes based on the image's use. Let me know what you think of it!

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On my end, I did a little bit of remodelling on the main site. You'll notice there's a login box on the right side of the page, THAT'S NOT FOR YOU ^_^. I threw in the ability to log in because I wanted to be able to use the kick-ass admin page I made for this blog. The admin page had, until now, been used solely with the version of this blog system I keep for personal use on my localhost server. But because it granted access to adding and editing news posts without the need to login, anyone who found that page could have messed with the news posts. Now that I've thrown in a login system, I can utilize the admin page for the purposes of keeping this blog up to date. Hooray for me!

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Lets see, personally, I've been accepted to 3 colleges so far. Texas Christian University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and University of California, Riverside have sent me notices of even, strangely enough, a flash video, saying I've been accepted to their school. Now, all that's left to hear from is Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Irvine and UC San Diego. I should hear from the last of the colleges I applied to by March.

Already, I've received hefty sums of money from TCU and IIT. TCU offered me a $38,000 scholarship over 4 years, which takes about a fourth of the total cost of college off my shoulders. IIT went one better and is giving me the opportunity to receive a full ride. I have to interview for this one, though, so that means a flight out to Chicago sometime next month.

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Well, that about wraps it up for today. Until next time, folks!
-Matt