Contemplations on school
So in short I went up to Iowa State University today and talked with people from their computer science department about their graduate studies program. I ended up talking to the lady that is basically the secretary and she had lots of information about the program and how things work. Then I went over and talked to the head of the department and we talked more about the software engineering focus and what some of the faculty members focus on. All in all I found out that Masters program is 31 credits and typically takes about 2 years for people to finish. The PhD program is 72 credits and usually takes about 5 years to finish. We also talked about assistanceships for which they have Teaching Assistanceships (TA basically, where you help the professor teach the courses), or Research Assistanceships (where you help the professors do their research). There are definate benefits to these since if you get one your tuition is paid in full if you are in the PhD program (1/2 paid if masters), you get health and dental and all that paid in full, and you get paid wages (said typically starts at about $1500 a month). So, I am a little up in the air about what I want to do as of yet. I need to look more into the different research that the professors are doing and figure out which areas interest me most and start meeting with the professors. I will need to start getting my stuff together for my application soon and take the GRE test since the deadline to get stuff into them is january 1st of next year. Anyways I have already talked to Jenn about this a bit but if anyone else has ideas, thinking points, opinions, or anything else you think might be helpful I would appreciate it :)