Advice for Sophomore - MIT

alpharfy
Sun, 05 May 2013 22:42:45 +0000

Don’t do it. I did, and regretted it. Take it over a semester. You need the time to let it soak in while you are learning it.

I’m a pretty quick learner. I knew next to nothing about calculus 3 months ago and I’m now gearing up to take the AP. The course is held at Stanford and is over the course of 8-weeks.



Statistics is good. Just make sure you take statistics for math or statistics majors (not business majors, not biology majors, not even engineers)

Good point. All that stuff must be figured out in the future.



Learn about financial investments - alpha, beta, gamma, and delta as measures of risk/return.

I’m taking [Engineering Economy](Stanford University Explore Courses) this summer, as well.



I’m guessing that Statistics is really beneficial in Cryptography.

More specifically, Cryptanalysis. I wonder what kind of statistics would be most applicable, though.



See if you can do any research or internship work in Cryptography.

I can’t this summer but next I already had a cryptography company in mind I’d like to intern for. How would I do research? Is it implied that it would be in a group of cryptographers or would I work alone?



Note: there are a lot of intelligence/military uses for cryptography. Maybe see if there is a way to leverage some financial aid for college.

Financial Aid isn’t really an issue for me but I guess I’ll take whatever I can squeeze out :P



Try to do EC’s related to your field of interest…

This is actually the part I’m having most trouble with. My school offers next to nothing in that respect. Robotics is tough when you’re on your own and don’t have a hackerspace. The only way I see to express my interest in the field is to program things solely for my computer, phone, and calculator. Beyond that is just a barrier. I tried robotics last summer and the summer before. It’s a real pain. The problems I encountered last year were the same as the year before and they all stemmed from cheap, inconsistent parts where “calibration” meant tuning it every run. The programming was hardly the difficult part. If the cryptography thing doesn’t work out, I’d try to get an internship at a big tech company with complex critical systems so that I can learn how things scale and whet my appetite to see distributed computing at its best. How would you recommend I go about your suggestion in my particular situation?