Southampton computing interview day
11 11 2008The main highlight was Will revealing that he was stalking one of the students who was giving us a tour. However, the interview was also pretty good. We discussed - very informalulzily, sort of how my conversations with friends go if they’re in a good mood - my A-level computing project, the Collatz conjecture (my interviewer’s wife had worked on it) and Last.fm. It turns out that Dr Paul Garatt, the admissions tutor who happened to sit in on my interview, supervised Richard Jones’ third year project - Audioscrobbler. Also, Tim Berners-Lee* lectures at Southampton occasionally and has set up web groups etc. there. There was some pretty awesome-sounding semantic web stuff there.
It made me think: what if universities integrated web science properly with informatics? Wouldn’t that be better? Otherwise, it takes extreme determination on the part of web developers to fashion themselves into experts. While people like Jeremy Keith are testament to how motivated - and as a consequence, skilful - people get with (semantic) web stuff, it’d be nice if people had their eyes opened without having to start from the angle of commercial web design. Also I wonder: if people like me, who are genuinely interested in the semantic web and aren’t either i) ignorant or ii) extremely dismissive, don’t work on it, who will? Perhaps someone will come along with a web messiah complex and fix it for us.
Pretty good!
Pax
* am I omitting the “Sir” as a sign of respect?
Were you the one who mentioned stochastic calculus at lunch as an application for differentiation/integration in computer science?
yes - don’t tell me you’ve found out that stochastic calculus is neither an application of differentiation/integration nor done computationally (or something)?
I’ve not got that far…yet.
I was just checking who you were - always interesting to see someone you have only ‘known’ as a web presence in real life.
i’m surprised you “knew” me at all - i’ll take a guess, though - you googled for “southampton interview”? what’s your second name, btw?
Southampton sounds like it’s going to be fun times. I’m going on the 2nd. Lulz.
Not quite - it’s a long story. I was searching for ‘Fiona Billingsley Computer Science Cambridge’ (I needed some working contact details or something), and I came across your blog. Finding out that you were in my year and applying for CS, I decided to check back every now and again. After you had posted about your interviews, I noted you had been invited to Southampton on the 22nd. However, when you mentioned stochastic calculus, I thought it was a bit of a coincidence (thinking about your post about Imperial). So I checked and you had indeed made a post about Southampton, and I wanted to check who you were etc etc… (this is online stalking if anything is - sorry)
second name = Hobson Sayers (yes, it’s double barrelled)
sounds good
Dr Leversha told us about the Collatz conjecture and set it as our homework to prove (as some sort of sick - or maybe just mischievous - joke).
that’s fairly sick
He said that we could either do that or do a practice C2. What a choice.