CMU CS Department has “Login Ball”
I’m horribly late with this, but a quick mention of a really nice event we had last Friday night, our annual “login ball”. This is a (semi-formal) party we have each fall term to welcome the new PhD students, faculty, visitors, and postdocs to the Computer Science Department. We had a great turnout, with about 200 people showing up.
One of the nice little traditions of the login ball is the “trivia test” introduction of the new PhD students. Mor Harchol, who runs the PhD program in computer science, introduces each new student by first giving some trivia about them and then asking everyone in the department to guess who it is. It is at this point when certain semi-embarrassing things are revealed. (Yes, it seems that we actually have a former prom king among us. ;-) I was particularly pleased to find out that one of our students is an avid auto racing fan and driver. (I’ll have to do some track time with him.) During these festivities, I noticed certain faculty members comparing notes, to see who had the most interesting new students…
Incidentally, on the subject of Mor Harchol, it is worth mentioning that she is continuing her great research in queuing theory, scheduling, and other related optimization problems. She is also well-known for her fantastic talk on how to apply to PhD programs in computer science.
Peter Lee @ October 22, 2008