(no subject)

I've been feeling really, really negative about Mudd and the CS department for a while. I hate feeling like I suck, and being around so many people with a lot of experience that I do not have pretty much makes me feel like I suck, regardless of actual truth in such a statement.

Professor Alvarado just emailed the CS major list about an internship for a company that does games intended to facilitate learning language and foreign customs. The description mentioned that an applicant should be interested in natural language processing, AI, and speech recognition, and that students with an "interdisciplinary cognitive science background" would be a particularly good fit. Which is pretty much me, right there. I mean, not the background so much, but the wanting of such a background. And I'll be more backgroundy after this semester.

I totally emailed the guy for more information, and suddenly I'm feeling much more hopeful about things. I'm wanting to do more research into what my Ideal Major would look like, for crying out loud. I gave that up last semester in favor of staring blankly at my computer screen.

Maybe next semester won't be so bad. I mean, even if this internship thing doesn't pan out -- they want more experience, they want different background, they want someone with a better GPA -- I know that there exist companies that do the sort of thing that I would want to do. Seriously, so cool.