malhar's SI admission blog

Fall Colors:

Yeah! Fall term is finally here and I have taken 15 credits again :-(. This time I am taking a lot of interesting ones like SI682, SI688, SI561 and all the basic ones :-) SI500, SI501. This semester has gone by really quickly, almost as fast as the leaves have fallen off the trees. Yup, the leaves first started turning red, I thought maybe it’s a new color they take up during this time of the year, then they turned yellow, then brown and then one fine morning there were no leaves. Now Ann Arbor has started looking like an English country side, clouds all the time and cold winds blowing against my face, feel like writing a sentence from an English novel – “the wind was crisp and smelt of fir leaves, there was no sunlight…”, sorry for fooling around, but really Ann Arbor has changed a lot, those shaded areas are now all bare and yeah I can see farther now, since leaves used to block the view from my window but now I can clearly see into other people’s homes and I think they can as well :-)
This term I have been working on a lot, there are two big projects, then I am re-doing my online portfolio and yes how can I forget JOB SEARCH!!! again :-(. Sometimes I feel that I have nothing more to do than just sit and apply. Applying sometimes feels like shooting an arrow in the dark, with no feedback as to what happened and then suddenly one day someone switches on the light and you see you have been shooting in the wrong direction. I hope this time I am standing facing the bull’s-eye not the other way as I was for my internship.
I take a pledge now I will keep my blog up-to-date from now on ;-)

More details about the winter semester:

I know I have been very brief about my winter term here at Michigan, so here it is…
The winter started out really fast and got over really fast:-). After giving 2 tests I got my SI502 requirement waived off. Then I got my JAVA programming requirement waived off. After all the waive offs and after an hour of brainstorming with Judy Lawson, I figured out the courses I wanted to take for my first term in the United States. I took:
1. SI627: Managing the IT organization
2. SI630: Security in digital world
3. SI650: Information Retrieval
4. SI760: Language & Information
5. OMS501: Business Statistics
I have an advice to all my readers; don’t take 15 credits in the first term. I will start from the top and describe each course in detail. SI627 had a lot of readings and online participation (needed to get accustomed to CTOOLS which was really hard). For the online participation I had to read a chapter from the reading and lead the discussion on that reading on CTOOLS. Once I figured out how to start a discussion on CTOOLS I was all set :-). We had two more deliverables for this subject, one was a presentation on a new and upcoming technology, so I chose augmented reality and gave a really amazing presentation with a video clip and everything. At the very end we were to give a project presentation, our team consisted of only 3 people so we lagged a bit in the project and the end result wasn’t as impressive as I had thought, but was good enough.
SI630 was a great class specifically because the professor himself was very passionate about security, so much so that he has his own public key setup :-). There were 3 papers due during this class which was fun since the topic chosen were really interesting by the professor. At the end of this class we were to present a project which helped people learn more about security in the digital world. So we developed a system which was a computer adaptive test that would test how secure are your data storage and data transmission habits and at the end this test would give you a score and compare you with others who have taken this test. We made a flash application for this project, which used to learn from the user’s responses and then give the next question based on the answer of the previous question. This test can be taken from my online portfolio. This course helped me a lot, in-fact I got together with the professor again over the summer to get some advice about a project that I was doing for one of my internship.
SI650 would be the most unforgettable class I have ever taken; Prof. Drago had a very different style of teaching. He was teaching this class here at University of Michigan and Columbia University in New York simultaneously. It was fun! The course was all about how information is retrieved by the search engines and how this information should be organized so that it is easier for the search engines to find this information. The course had 3 assignments, programming based in which we were supposed to use CLAIRLIB developed by Prof. Drago himself in Perl and solve the problem of the assignment. There was a final term for the course along with a project. My project was really interesting; Prof. Drago had a large data set of user queries to the AOL search engine. I used this corpus to form a graph of the users and then on this graph I performed Random walks to assign weights to each user so that at the end based on these weights I can cluster the users and see some pattern. For this I used JAVA and the JUNG API written in JAVA for the visualization of the clusters. I also made use of the LUCENE API. JUNG API was really cryptic for me at first, but I was able to grasp it through the help of the support staff at sourceforge.net
SI760 was a good course specifically because the instructor had amazing skills of teaching. This course had 3 assignments, a midterm and a final term. I don’t know what to describe about the course, because most of it was just studying and understanding the concepts.
OMS501 was the statistics course from the business school. I took this since it was a requirement and also I got to complete my cognate, but I still plan to take more cognates. This class was held in the new business school building and was real great fun. The professor had a really good sense of humor and used to explain the concepts really well. For this course there were two projects and a number of assignments on the Wiley site, for which I had to purchase an account. Apart from that this class was fun and most of the students were part-time MBA students there so got to learn a lot from them.

Let’s get down into what I did at each of my internship:

1. Rackham Graduate school – they hired me to redo all their PDF forms which were used by more than 7000 graduate students. But believe this is not all what I did. When I got into working there initially they gave me all the forms and asked me to evaluate what was wrong with each form and what could be done to improve them. I got down on the task a developed a visual report of what the forms contained and what was redundant and what could be improved. We met with all the departments in Rackham (yes they have departments in there too), like OARD (Office of Academic Records and Dissertations), Financial Aid, Admissions, etc. and presented our findings and their inputs on the forms. I used the feedback and started developing the new forms, but was faced by a new hurdle. Rackham had come up with a new logo and that had to go onto the new forms, but was yet to be approved by the dean. So this project was put on hold till then.
Meanwhile I was helped my colleagues with another project which was university wide signage system, but Rackham had the two pilot kiosks. We got these two 52” humongous kiosks in our office, but we didn’t have the software yet to deploy content on them. We built a few small flash applets and had fun with the touch screens for a while but then this project was also waiting on the company which was to provide the software for the touch screen kiosks.
Then I was jumped onto another big project where Rackham was shifting from Right Now to Support Suite, both of which are customer support tools, i.e. they manage and organize the tickets raised by customers, which in our case were students. I helped in the migration which was a lot, since we had to migrate all the knowledgebase entries from Right Now to Support Suite and while doing that clean up the formatting of the entries as well. There were around 2000 entries and we were just two people. We kept at it and one fine day we were done, then we had this task of making customers jump from the old site to the new one, we developed a JavaScript for doing that. Then we got down into the look and feel of the interface for support suite and also training our staff members on how to use them. This was the same time when the Rackham logo was launched so we had to redesign the Rackham website as well to accommodate the new logo. We redesigned the new Rackham website and also redesigned the support suite interface to match the new Rackham site. Finally we developed a training manual and presented it to our staff in three training sessions. You can now view the new site and support suite (help link) on www.rackham.umich.edu
Since the Rackham logo was approved, I finally completed the PDF forms and got them reviewed from each of the departments and launched them on the Rackham site. You can view them on the Rackham site. Then the kiosks also got quickly deployed after the software came through and we got over a few housekeeping issues with the mac mini’s running the kiosk. These kiosks are now placed in the Rackham Lobby.
At the end it was time to say goodbye, which has always been the hardest part for me, but had to, since school was starting.
2. HiperLogic – HiperLogic is a local start-up, whose co-founder is a U-M grad, Rodney Mach. Rod was more like an elder brother than a supervisor. I got to learn a lot from him. The first few meetings went by in setting up my paperwork, which Rod helped me out a lot with. Rod is a very active person, always on the move and has so much of interesting things to share. My first task was redesigning the interface of HiperLogic Activation Filter (HAF) – an app developed by Rod in C#. It took me a while to understand the code and start working on it. I came up with a lot of high-fi and lo-fi prototypes and Rod and I brainstormed together as to what his clients wanted in-terms of the interface. This was an ongoing project, along with this Rod used to take me a lot to his client locations, where I got to see him present and promote the products which Rod provided. I got to visit Lansing where I was in a meeting room full of high-flying executives, making decisions whether to buy this stuff for their server room or not.

Besides these Rod had another project for me, where one of our partner firms AndersonDataOnline wanted a redesign of their website. The website was pretty old and they wanted me to completely revamp it in terms of looks and also functionality. I was working on this and HAF simultaneously. Rod and I together organized a number of AAVUG (Ann Arbor Virtualization User Group) meets as well, where we invited a number of executives from various energy firms, car companies, etc.

Rod provided a lot of advice about the lifestyle in United States as well as, technical advice about how to do stuff. At the end I completed both my projects, one of them can be viewed at www.andersondataonline.com and the other interfaces of HAF would soon be posted on my portfolio online. Saying goodbye was the hardest part again, but it was the best goodbye ever – Rod and his wife took us to fine Indian restaurant for dinner and we really enjoyed ourselves there.
3. eDirect Impact – eDirect Impact has a number of big clients like KPMG, Honeywell, Pizza Hut and they provide Software as a Service to these clients, like data storage, data extraction, etc. This work was more modular in the sense that I was handed a module at a time and when I got that done then I moved to the next one. eDirect wanted me to work mostly on their SharePoint environment, so my modules were mostly related to that.
My first module required me to get the disk usage for each of their clients on a particular server. This was really difficult since an application in SharePoint is generally not given this information, so I had to learn how to impersonate a user account and get this information, which turned out to be harder than it sounds. Finally when I got around it and presented this module to my team they were super-impressed and that helped affirm their confidence in my skills. They gave me more modules one of which required me to integrate SharePoint with another application called IPRO, which they thought was not possible, but when I did it (partly because SharePoint is so flexible) they felt that as if I had done magic. At the end they offered me to continue my position into the fall term and I did.
Some of the issues with this internship were because of the remote work. Since all the meetings taking place were over the phone or the internet, it sometimes caused a bit of a problem to work around a problem, but I’d say that the team was so accommodating that we made it through.
You will notice that I describe very less about my last two internships, that is partly because this is the only amount of information I can reveal legally ;-)

Let’s get down into the details

I know I was really brief about my internships in my previous posts, but that was purposely done :-) so I could elaborate here, so here goes…
When I joined the School of information in the winter term, I hadn’t thought what I would be doing in the summer, specifically because I didn’t know that there would be 4 months of no school, since it doesn’t happen in India. As February came I became aware of these 4 months of no school and got to know that this is the part where you do an internship.
I started my quest for the search of an internship. I was a complete newbie at this, my resume was pathetic, I didn’t have a portfolio of my work, nothing, I had to start from scratch. Kelly and Joanna helped me shape-up my resume and get onto iTrack (SI’s career site). I started sending out my resume and started applying for jobs from various jobsites like monster, careerbuilder, juju, etc. No response.
Then came this career fair at the engineering school, and guess what I didn’t have a suit and also no money to buy one :-(. Luckily there was a sale going on at Sears in Briarwood mall on Arrow jackets and trousers, so I mixed and matched and got myself a suit for the career fair. I was all ready with my resume and certificates put into my SI folder. The career fair came and went by; I applied, but again no response. Then again there was a career fair specifically for new start-ups in the Ann Arbor area; I went to it but with dampened enthusiasm. Applied again, but still no response.
I visited a lot of career events organized by SI career office, the specific one that I remember was the internship panel, where there were 4 seniors who were talking about their internship experience. I just remember what one of them (Andres Montejo) said – “Gorilla tactics – if you want a position keep applying to it until you get it”. I took it as a motivation and kept going at my internship search. I got a few enthusiastic responses at SI ExpoSItion but still no response. At this point I also started building an online portfolio which is now at: http://www.umich.edu/~malhar.
Then came the Yahoo! Hack day at the college of engineering. I wasn’t able to attend it because of the course load (15 credits, Phew!), even though I heard some of the biggies like Paul Tarjan and Rasmus Lardoff were there. Fortunately, Prof. Drago, with whom I was taking Information Retrieval, got these folks to one of our lectures and they gave a super-cool presentation and also their email addresses  to collect resumes. I sent across mine and guess what, no response; just kidding I got a phone interview setup.
Wow this was a dream come true for me interviewing for a position with Yahoo! Awesome. I had the interview followed all the protocols of a good phone interview but they decided to take someone else. That was a really de-motivated me, but I kept going. Finally after a number of failed attempts, I got a position at a U-M office, but they only paid $10.50 an hour (great! I would earn more if I drove the blue bus I thought) but money wasn’t a concern, still I had to consider it since I had to pay-off my education loans. Thankfully to God I got offered a job then by HiperLogic, Prof. Drago, MAIS and Rackham Graduate school, all within 4 days :-):-):-) This was great but unfortunately I cannot work for more than 40 hours at U-M so I had to turn down Prof. Drago’s and MAIS’s offer.
I was all set working my two jobs (one was remote work), then one day I get an email from a guy in Texas that he saw my portfolio and wants to hire me. And this person is the Director of Business development at eDirect Impact. Wow! I couldn’t turn him down and started remote work with him as well. At that point my summer became no less than a school semester of more than 18 credits. I was working most of the time. I would work 8 to 5 at one job and come back home and work around 6 hours for the other two. On the weekends I used to work around 16 hours so that I could cope up with my other two jobs. But it was a fun and wild experience, I learned so very much.
Ah! I forgot to mention one thing. During my internship search someone told me that you cannot work off-campus on an F-1 visa until you have completed a year of school and this was true for me since I had only completed 6 months of school – this shattered me. Luckily :-) there is a loophole in this. If you are required to work as a requirement for you course, then you can. Great! School of information had this concept of PEP (Professional Engagement Program), which allowed me to earn credits for my internship and hence I could get a CPT to work!

Internship

Hi Followers,

I am writing this to describe more about my internships which I did over the summer, so here goes:

1. HiperLogic, LLC: This is a local start-up here in Ann Arbor, which provides various virtualization products from vendors like VMWARE, XSIGO, etc. to the various car companies in the vicinity. I was working on improving the UI of one of their app and also rebuilding their website.

2. eDirectImpact, LLC: They provide SaaS to various big firms for managing the information related to law suits, which is usually in TeraBytes. I helped them with their sharepoint environment.

3. Last but not the least I worked at Rackham Graduate School as a web designed and I redesigned all the PDF forms, which are used by more than 7000 students.

Hope you enjoyed this short and crisp description of my internships, if you would like to learn more then visit my website at: www.umich.edu/~malhar

Bye....

My projects

I never got around to writing about the projects that I did since I have come here. Well here they are:

1. Alternate Spring Break 2009:

I volunteered to work at Cabrini Connections, Chicago. This is a small not for profit organization which helps under privileged children move towards a first career through various activities like after school programs, etc. They are connected to a lot of organizations in various fields like legal services, corporate services, etc. which help them in their endeavors.
I transformed a static conceptual map at their website into a visualization applet. This applet helped new volunteers understand the role of Cabrini Connections plays in helping these kids. This applet can be seen on their site at: www.tutormentorexchange.net (its on the rightmost link on the top named "Village strategy map").

2. I made a computer adaptive security test for my SI630 class. This test can be found here. This test rather than evaluating how secure your computer system is tests hows secure you are in terms of computer security namely your browsing and data storage habits.
The questions that are thrown at the test-taker are based on their responses to prior questions. At the end each user is associated with a score, which tell the user whether he is in the safe zone or the danger zone, along with a couple of recommendations about how to improve.

3. Clustering users based on their queries to the AOL search engine. Yes I had access to thousands of actual user queries from the AOL database. I used JUNG and lucene to perform random walks on this data and then cluster the users based on their similarities in querying. More about this would soon be appearing on my personal blog, where I would be talking about the algorithm I made and how I finally cracked into how to use JUNG :)

Then there were a number of other projects for the management class and the statistics class that I took, one of them was about a regression analysis I did in predicting the market based on a couple of parameters like GDP, dollar index, etc.

I am Back !

Hi Everyone,

I know I have not been keeping up my promises of keeping my blog up to date. Well I am here now and here are some of the things I promised to you guys, but before that, since most of you would be already packing stuff to come here, here is some last minute advise to keep in mind:

1. Book your flight tickets early, so there is not some last minute problems. Also clearly understand the baggage requirements, since some airlines are very strict and if you are not careful you might have to leave some of your stuff behind or pay a huge amount of money to the airlines to carry it with you.

2. Try and take a flight which has the least lay-overs, since every-time you stop you have to walk through all the security checks again.

3. Carry all you important documents like VISA, Passport, University issued i20 and offer letter in a folder in your handbag. Checked in baggage gets lost all the time so carry a pair of clothing in your handbag as well.

4. Start looking for an apartment (if you are planning to live off-campus) right now. You can go to various sites like:

www.rent.com
www.apartmentsearch.com
www.craigslist.com

Though do not finalize anything until you have a look for yourself.

This is about it, if anything else comes to my mind, then I'll put it in my blog.

All the best hope to see you guys soon.

P.S. Keep in constant touch with your international buddies they are the best sources of information for you.

End of Winter '09

The winter term here at Michigan has come to end and the great weather has started to arrive. Today we got a chance to experience a beautiful rainy day. This semester was one of the greatest experiences in my life, I developed an application that clustered users based on their queries to a search engine, presented a VC proposal for a new startup company, visited Google Ann Arbor, met Rasmus Lerdorf and Paul Tarjan during Yahoo! Hack Day, hunted for internships in this slow economy 
I am going to be posting all these experiences in more detail in my upcoming posts. Right now I just wanted to clarify that the admission decisions would be coming out soon all the students who have been waiting in anticipation would be more than satisfied with their results.
The graduation ceremony is also drawing close and we are all preparing for the big day. Two of my fellow recruiting officers would be graduating, I wish them all the very best in their future ventures. I would be covering this event as well in my posts. So we have very exciting posts coming up on this spot, so stay tuned…

Detour! – THE ENGLISH REQUIREMENT

Recently a few of incoming students have been balked by a statement in their letter of acceptance from Rackham Graduate school, which says that you have to take an English proficiency test before registering for classes. This has been bothering quite a few of the students. So I would be taking a small detour to shed some light on this test, before I continue describing my voyage towards and beyond the school of information. Well, let’s shed some divine wisdom about this “clause”:

• The incoming students to the University of Michigan, whose native language is not English, need to fulfill English competency requirements. These requirements are tested by various standardized tests like TOEFL, IELTS, etc. The score requirements which show the university that the student is proficient in English and can cope with the courses being taught here, are listed on the following link:
English requirement

• The above link also describes the cases wherein a shortfall in the score of a particular standardized test, requires the student to take up the AEE (Academic English Evaluation). The cases are very well presented in a tabular form at the bottom of the page.

• AEE – “The Academic English Evaluation (AEE) is used to evaluate the English language skills of nonnative speakers of English entering UM and to assign them to appropriate EAP (English for Academic Purposes) classes.” – University of Michigan’s English Language Institute.
• Now lets decode the above sentence, the University of Michigan has among many others an English language institute and you might have guessed it, that is also among the most reputed in the world , so the people at this institute are trying to say that, students who are nonnative speakers of English, who are entering UM (that’s University of Michigan’s acronym), need to take this test, so that their English proficiency can be evaluated and they can be recommended a few English courses to take up just incase their English proficiency is not adequate. A more detailed description can be found from the home page of the institute here.

• There are links on the above page that navigate you to the appropriate page to register for the test. These tests are offered all throughout August until the mid of September, so you would have ample of time to appear for the test but I would recommend registering for the test before arriving so that they are not all full.
• While we are at it so lets clear up a few myths as well
o “My admit to the university would be taken back if I fail this test”
 This is absolutely not true, if you are not able to score appropriately in this test you would be asked to take up a few English courses here at the university, along side your other courses.
o “I won’t be able to register for classes until I take the test”
 The university is aware that as you come in it would be very difficult for you to give the test before registering for the classes, so you are required to take the test before registering for the next semester, so that you are not over-whelmed with a lot when you arrive.
So summing it all up, I’d recommend victims of this “clause”, not to be surprised and shocked but, also not to take this lightly. Register for the test before arriving, prepare if you feel you need to and go ahead and give the test. This is no big deal and is only meant to give feedback to nonnative English speakers about any areas that they may want to work on during their studies here at SI.

P.S. If you are required to take the test then it would be mentioned in the letter from Rackham graduate school, if the letter states nothing of this sort then hurray! You are a free bird :-), welcome!

How to manage your applications

While I was applying to various universities for my Master’s I came across a plethora of information, such as the application deadlines, financial aid requirements, application documents required, VISA formalities, etc, etc, etc. In fact there was so much information that at one point I thought that it would be great if someone had a small little Google managing and searching only application information. Well since there was nothing like that I took it onto my head to organize this information properly so that I don’t miss any critical point or date and so that I could use any and all the information for my benefit.
Well after I was done with all my standardized tests (which was such a relief, phew!), I started short listing universities which I wanted to attend. Well the list was never ending. So I fixed a number to which I would limit the list. One of the factors to limit the list was to monetary as well since each application required around $100-$150, including everything from official transcripts to score reporting to international couriers. Once the list was finalized I prepared a spreadsheet for managing and tracking my applications. The spreadsheet looked something like the one below:

Through this spreadsheet I was able to keep a track of the things I had done for each application and the things that were still pending. Each column depicted tasks and each row depicted an application, also each cell showed the status of the task.
Once you have your application process under control, you can easily manage your applications without missing out on critical stuff or missing any deadline.

What do you do at the school of information?

I have been faced by this question a lot since I have taken up this course. To me it sounds like someone from the 50’s or 60’s is asking an IBM employee, “What do you do in there?”
I believe the design of the school of information was done with keeping in mind that information is becoming like an intangible commodity (just like software), which needs to be engineered and then managed. So I’d like to answer this question in just two simple words – “Information Engineering”, which no doubt confuses people more . So I try and break it down like this:
“Engineering is a trait that human beings as a species have, from this derived mechanical engineering, where we tried to engineer stuff that moved about, then came electronics engineering which was derived when there was felt a need to move electrons about, this gave rise to computer engineering, which helped in engineering automated devices, then software engineering, to help move about computer instructions and now Information engineering, which in essence is realizing information as a very essential and critical commodity which more often than not has a monetary value associated with it, hence the need to generate, collect it with engineering precision and once accumulated, manage it to get the most from it.”

Why the School of Information?

I remember the day when I received my admit letter from the school of information, it was like a sweet shock to me. It was approximately a month after I had applied and this was one of my first admits. I had applied to the school of information specifically because of the flexibility of the programs that are offered here. I have not seen any other place where you have literally a plethora of courses, from all over the University of Michigan, to choose from.
I had initially applied for the Information Analysis & Retrieval specialization, since I had an information technology background, and besides, this specialization most appropriately aligned my interests of pursuing a career in Google. After I arrived, and took up a few courses, I couldn’t help myself but take up another specialization, i.e. Human Computer Interaction, since the courses in this specialization helped me take the perspective of my work from the end-users side.
The school of information has something for everyone ranging from software professionals to corporate managers to archivists. Here you can pick up courses from some of University of Michigan’s world renowned schools like the business school, college of engineering, etc.