Advice for Sophomore - MIT

OperaDad
Tue, 07 May 2013 01:44:38 +0000

Other than robotics would you have any idea what more I could be doing to boost myself?



Like the article said: Pursue your passion. I can’t decide that for you. You have to find out what is available in your area. If you lived in Washington DC, your options would be a lot more than Nome, Alaska.

There is a lot of hard work in college. Not all of it is fun. Sometimes you have to do the grunt work to make it to the next level. Robotics is just one way to gain experience in recognizing patterns in otherwise random data - which I presume is a fundamental skill of cryptanalysis. If you are an expert in it, then I suppose robotics would be a bore. If you are not, then it is one way to gain real world experience. It is not a trivial problem for a computer to take a picture and try to find the targets, especially under real world conditions (something in front of you blocking part of the picture, lighting, etc.). And, then do it real time within the constraints of the CPU and other work the CPU must do.

You can also try to find out if there is a USA version of the competition you can enter: