I am moving to Baltimore for my job. Driving up with the parents Wed-Thurs, and will start work Sept 5. More later.

22 years...its all downhill from here

happy birthday to me!

I sat in on a class by Dr. Frank Tipler today, since I was on campus and had nothing to do. Was interesting, and I spoke with him afterward about my career. He told me if I liked engineering, to go with it; both it and Physics are great fields. But I think he hoped that I would later come back to academia, because he asked me my salary and then told me that it was slightly less than what new Associate Professors make at Tulane. I just want to be happy doing something with my life.

Here is something from a book I am reading by Christopher Moore, Fluke:

" It might be in the lab at four in the morning after working on the data for five years, but there comes a point where youll find something out, where youll see something or where something will suddenly come together, and youll readlize that you know something that no on else in the world knows yet. Just you. No one else. You realize that all the value you have is in that one thing, and youre only going to have it for a short time until you tell someone else, but for that time youre more alive than youll ever be. Thats the jazz, Thats why people do this, put up with low pay and high risk and crap conditions and fucked-up relationships. They do it for that singular moment."

InshaAllah.

a bit of nostalgia from an 03/2005 post:

Why did I wanna do physics in the first place? It interested me yes, but I fear I also wanted to be able to act like a pompus ass who knows everything, and infact know everything. But tis harder than I imagined, and the internet and its distractions do not help with the studying by the way. Will I end up a great scientist like Abdus Salaam, or Feynman? Probably not. Unless I am terribly terribly lucky.

"To succed in physics you must be one in a million, but your chances of being that are a million to one" someone once told me in highschool, and its more true now then ever.

But, Allah provides for all, and if I am to be a lowly engineer making $58k out of undergrad, Ill be happy. The only thing lacking would be a PHD in physics, although that would still give me the same salary of about $58k. At least with a PHD in physics I could go around acting like an ass. My intentions are clear I hope.

Clear intentions, not neccesarily good ones.

Either way, its safe to say I will make more than my parents, and as far as Im concerned, thats progress. Someone once said "We fight wars so that our children may build bridges", and thats the way I see it with immigrants in the US. Our parents work the 12-hour shifts at the age of 60, like my dad and his gas station, so we can focus on learning enough to get a better job, with an office and airconditioining.

But physics would have been fun. Maybe it will still be.

School Is OVER!!!!...for now...

So graduation was last weekend, and I felt its about time to reflect upon it. Not that I consider it a major achievement or anything, its just that people around me seem to.

I got a call from Agilent Technologies in Santa Rose, CA on Thursday. We had an hour long phone interview, and they seemed impressed. When I told them I had an offer pending, they decided to fly me out there on Monday. So I had to fly out Sunday for an interview in Santa Rosa, and then go straight to another interview with IBM on Wednesday in Chicago. I was allot less stressed out this time around, since I had an offer pending. Having an offer under your belt when going to an interview is like walking into a fight with a semi-automatic gun. Way better than a butter knife.

Everyone but my oldest sibling came down to see me walk. There was high demand for the limited number of tickets for the unified university-wide ceremony, not only because I was participating, but also because Presidents Bush Sr. and Clinton were going to speak. So we each got 7 tix, and infact I ended up needing all of them for the family. The ceremony was at 9:30am, and the graduates had to show up by 8:45am. Needless to say, I showed up at 9:15am and was able to squeeze into the right part of the graduates, that being the group of 150 or so Engineering graduates. This was the last year that the School of Engineering at Tulane would be recognized, so we were told over and over again how significant this was. I didn't give a damn, and I don't think most other people did either: after having your department eliminated what kind of alumni would look back? 50 year graduates returning for honors? Not I.

One of my best friends is the Co-Val from Engineering, and he decided to wear one of those Train Engineer hats. Engineering was put near the front of the line, so we passed kids from Liberal Arts, Law, and architecture on our way up to the front, and were greeted along they way by snide remarks like: "Oh look its the Engineers!", or "You think you're better than us?". My friend and I were near the front, and we did not hesitate to reply in kind, as this was our last chance to mock those of a lesser mental capacity than ourselves. Not to say we had not done so every chance we had over the last 4 years.



Tulane has done a great job of convincing parents, the media, and locals with money that they actually give a damn about New Orleans. Phrases such as "unique culture", "history" and "determination of the people" were used sparingly to say the least. Plenty of minorities were invited to participate in the graduation of the school that is known to locals as "The Plantation".

Bush Sr. spoke first, talking about how important it was to help your fellow man. Thanks Mr. President, but maybe you outta start with your own kids. Then came Clinton, who spoke about the same stuff. It was interesting to note that Clinton got a standing ovation, and far more applause from the liberal-college-educated crowd that Bush. Of course, our Pres. Cowen AKA my Favourite Fat Yehudi, did not miss any time kissing the asses of both war criminals. The Presidents left early.




As the ceremony was closing, Ellen Degeneres showed up in a white bathrobe. The vast majority of the crowd did not know this would happen, and I have a feeling it was not planned. She went on stage and told everyone she heard there was "a party where everyone was going to wear robes", but not those kind of robes. Ellen is actually from New Orleans, and her mother worked at Newcomb College, which has been swallowed by Tulane University in its Bold and Courageous Plan to make kids forget their majors in 20 years.

After the ceremony, we hauled for the shuttles to get to the School of Engineering graduation on campus. This was where we received our actually diplomas, after having our names called individually. Met up with two friends, one which I had not seen for a year. The groups of majors were called up one by one; Computer Engineering only had 5 graduates so it was a small group.

After the ceremony, met outside with my parents, and the families of those two friends of mine. Talked for a while about our plans, our families met each other, and invited each other over later in the day. I went to meet up with some friends on campus right afterward. The vibe there was really strange though: I realized I only new a few people. Said my goodbyes and got out of there. I had some time to wait for my sis to bring the car around, so I went up to the Physics building and walked around. No one was there, of course, but it kind of gave me a nice nostalgic feeling. Or at least I hoped it would.

We picked up a cake on the way home, and had some chai with it. Then we threw a barbecue, and some guests came over. Afterwards I began packing for my long trip. I made sure to have fun on this trip.

I wish I showed up to this class more often...

Requim for a Microsoft SDET Interview

So its been a few weeks since the Microsoft interview, but I thought it would be worthwhile to write about experience in detail. It was not only great practice for future interviews, and a free vacation, but a memorable experience from an academic, social, and psychological perspective.

Some, if not most of it is undoubtedly corrupted but post-interview experiences. I have forgotten many questions, but would hope that I remembered the most important ones.

Here is what I can remember:

I had an on campus interview and I did well, so I got an email a week or so later asking me to come up to Seattle. My interview was April 20th. Got to Seattle and met up with a friend up there, got my rental car and went to the hotel to crash for the night. Its a nice hotel, about 5 minutes from Building 19, and has more than a 100 Microsoft interviewees on any given night, according to the girl at the front desk. That number was definitely a downer.

Set about three alarms for 8am, my interview was at 10:30, but ended up not needing them since I woke at about 5:30 and couldn't fall back asleep. Read up some in the book I have been using to study: Programming Interviews Exposed. I should have read more, because I ended up needing it later.

Got to the campus with a halfhour to spare, but it took me time to find Building 19, and then to find parking. Walked into the building about 10:24, gave my name to the front desk attendant and had a seat. Had not had anything to eat, so I grabbed a can of cranberry juice and played some Xbox. There were other kids in the lobby, and I struck up a conversation with one who had parked next to me. He said he had interviewed for a SDE three years ago, and not got he job, so was back now with some experience under his belt for an SDET position. Gave me a few pointers: be confident and think out loud. I wonder how he did, because at the end of the day I went to my car, and the rest of the lot was empty except for his car. He was a good kid, and I hope he did well.

My HR rep came out and took me to her office. This was not the person I had met on campus, nor the person I had communicated with via email. We talked a bit about Microsoft, New Orleans, and my job search. She asked me why I wanted to work at Microsoft and I told her that it seemed like I could have the most impact on the most people by working here. I don't think this is much of a formal interview, from what I understand it is a kind of warm up for the interviewees. She told me about the shuttle, and the interview process, gave me her card and direct number in case I needed it. Then she told me Id be interviewing with Works and Portal (which I already knew) and that my first interviewers name (which, along with the other names I have forgotten). She told me she would hold on the free Mircosoft T-shirt for me, and give it to me at the end of the day. Most interviews, I was told, ended 4-5pm, and Building 19 closed at 7pm, so the time would not be a problem. I got into the shuttle (the other kids in there were nice enough to let me ride shotgun). I have to say that a good number of the people there to interview that I spoke with were not entry level, and this was a comfort and a scare for me on several levels.

My first interview was with a man in Portal. I confess, I still am not entirely sure what they do, but if they are responsible for the MSN portal site, they suck. Simplicity is key, as Google knows. Anyway, the guy is one of those typical tech people that have been there for years and years, and have probably interviewed plenty of kids. He asked me if I wanted a soda, and since he was getting one, I grabbed a diet Dr. Pepper. Turned out his office had literally dozens of empty diet Pepsi cans on the table. He sat me down and asked me a few questions. I recall being asked many "conversation" questions like this throughout the day, but forgot many of these by the next morning...they come to me on occasion.

I was told that the coding problem I was going to get was difficult, and most interviewees took the entire time to do it, so don't be worried. I replied with a stupid grin, as I did throughout the rest of the day. He went to the board and starting writing a function with an underscore ("_) at the start of the name, and asked me why that was there. I guessed it was some convention, and he said yes, that it was used to distinguish non-STL functions. The problem given me was this: write a function that takes a float, an integer of precision places, a char* buffer, and have it write to the buffer the string value of this float. Basically, given a number like 1.245, convert it to a string and if the precision says only 2 places, then round this to 1.25 in the process. Often during his posing of the problem, I sensed a pause and mistook it as an ending and looked to the board to start coding. I was a bit jumpy. Anyway, I gave him a grin when he was done and went over his example again. Then I told him a bit about the more frequent integer-to-ASCII problem and how this was similar. Then I explained to him that I would work first on the float to string problem, and worry about the decimal and rounding later. He said OK, and I went on to do the int-ASCII problem. Then I began thinking about the decimal, when to put these chars into the buffer, and the rounding. Eventually with his help I was able to put the entire thing into the buffer with the decimal going in the right place, but found that the rounding was still a problem. By now we had been at it about an hour, and I thought he was impressed, but he left the room to fetch the next interviewer and asked me to work on the rounding problem. When he got back, I gave him my solution (just add .5 or .05 etc to the number and cast it as an int at the start) and he was satisfied.

The next interviewer was one of my favorite personalities: laid back and simple and smart. He said that we were a bit late, so we would go to lunch. I was asked to disregard any interview stuff, and just relax and eat lunch. I liked his philosophy: you can either eat or interview, and if you try both the only thing that will happen is both parties go home hungy. So we ate, and we did talk a bit about this and that. I told him about my experience as a tech. services rep and we talked about the Windows Bug Report functionality and how many people actually send an error report. I was surprised to learn that there are millions of people, and even though this is a small fraction of the ppl using MS products, I honestly thought NO ONE really bothered to send reports. He seemed intrigued by my explanations for why the percentages were low however, and we finished and went back to his office.

He put up the function prototype I had just coded earlier in the day and asked me about testing it. This is where it became apparent to me that I should read job descriptions closely: an SDET is expected to know about testing. I threw out some test cases, all falling as I would later realize under the "functional" category. I think that the next part of the interview was planned ahead of time, and is probably done for most SDET interviewees: I was given a short rundown of major testing categories. These included, from what I recall functional, stress, regression, load, performance, maintenance, and deployment testing. They may have been called by other names, but as I later learned these are the categories an SDET tries to work with when trying to break a piece of software.

I had been conditioned unfortunately through four years of college to throw out functional cases. We have been required to produce test plans for every software assignment at Tulane, but honestly they are some of the last pieces of the assignment we work on, and personally I never put much time into them. If the code worked, I turned it in. This works for our projects, but I suppose when we are talking about a piece of software that will be used by billions of people, we need to take much more into account and be far more professional, even hiring specialized developers (SDETs) to take care of this task. This was the major problem with my interview.

Anyway, I left this interview feeling like it may have been a good idea to take notes for the rest of the day. My next interview was with another group, the Works group, across campus in the Willow buildings. I took the shuttle and was happy to recognize my driver from the MSDN Jobblog video. She is somewhat of a reluctant celebrity now, she told me. She also gave me a few pointers on interviewing, just from what she has overheard hiring managers talk about around her over the years.

My next interview was with an SDET from the Works group, and this was the only one that did not involve any coding at all. We started out talking about what an SDET does in general, and then on what their role is on a project like Works. As an ongoing piece of software with a relatively small group of developers, Works is one of the few Microsoft groups that has members that can claim they "own" an entire piece of software such as a word editor or image viewer. This was the first interviewer I met that had a background not in traditional CS but in web development. Kind of made me feel good to know that Microsoft and companies like it do hire diverse people (sadly this is often not reflected in their products). The interview involved a series of discussions/questions most of which I do not recall. I remember talking about what makes a good SDET. What, as a new hire, can you bring to a team of SDET's? Situational questions like "If you are a Lead SDET asked to signoff on a piece of software two weeks before release, what bugs will you look for/fix and why?" Basically, it was a question that went to the heart of the matter: what categories of tests do you view as the most critical to a successful piece of software? This is the most important question, and I recommend anyone going for an SDET interview think long and hard about this, and have a good answer and rationale to back it up. Do not go to Seattle thinking you can make this stuff up on the spot: this is what separates hires from non-hires.

I was shown what a Windows debug report looks like, and asked what kind of things I would like to see int he report, why they were needed, and how best to search through this huge memory dump to pick out the relevant parts. This is another classic open-ended Microsoft question, but not one you should hope to answer on the spot. Think about this ahead of time. I named required info such as system specs, the programs in memory at the time of the crash, and the instruction that was being executed when the crash occurred (the crashing instruction). I talked about pattern matching to mine the relevant data from a report. Throughout this interview, it seemed like the interviewer kept asking a question until he got not just any good answer, but the one he was looking for, and quit frankly this annoyed me a bit and I believe I may have expressed this feeling.

The interviewer opened up Windows Explorer and asked me to test it. After a few minutes, he gave me the situation that I was an SDET assigned to the Folder pane of the Explorer, and it was my job to test it shortly before release. What would I look for, why, and what categories of testing would that fall under? The same time-crunch question had come up again: it seems that at Microsoft at least often time software developers work on a product for 2/3 of the dev time, and the SDETs get the software in the last 1/3 of the phase, before release. Thus, they have to make important decisions about which bugs to tell the SDE's to fix, and have to be able to prioritize these quick.

I recalled a bit of what I had learned in the last interview, but had trouble coming up with tests outside of the functional category and then placing each in the correct category. One area that I had alot of trouble with was the Acessibilty Features of Windows. It seems the SDET's expect you to know about these features, and to have a good handle for what makes a program compatible with them, and what they do to the the way a piece of software in Windows is executed. This was a problem for me, since I had never used any of those features. I never used Sticky Keys, Magnifier, or anything else, and only knew of these because I had turned them off at one point or another. This, of course, is a big drawback, and will keep anyone from answering questions and solving hypothetical problems. Make sure you play around with these features in Windows. Infact, make sure you play around with all the little features Windows is bundled with like the calculator, calendar, notepad, address book, wordpad, etc...all those little programs you dont care to, or never got around to using. These make excellent interview questions because they are relatively easy to "learn" in a few minutes even for someone who has never used them, and have a few features that are easily testable. Study them well, because I honestly rarely even use Windows Explorer, probably because it is buried deep in my Start menu compared to the double-click availability of My Computer.

My next interview was coding related once again. This one dealt with a good bit of data structures however. I was asked some questions about my background, about my Senior Design (which was on my resume and interested the interviewer). Then I was asked a few things about data structures. I was asked to explain what arrays and linked lists were and why and when we would use them. I believe I did pretty well on that, then I was asked about hash tables and I think I got that one as well. The next question was something along the line of "If you were organizing books in a library, how would you store them and what data structure would you use?" I said I would organize them by the ISBN as the key because this number was unique, and I would put these into a binary search tree to allow for O(nlogn) search time. Then I was asked to write the code for removing a duplicate from a singly linked list. I should have been able to do this much faster because I had studies this answer int he week leading up the interview, and felt I had a good handle on Lists. Like a few other aspects of the interview though, I left things to chance and felt that if presented with the problem I could think through it. Didn't happen. Perhaps it was because I was nervous, or because I was tired from a day of interviews, or simply did not have a handle on pointers as well as I thought I did. In any case, it took me some time to work through the problem of keeping a pointer to the current node, and a pointer to the next node. My solution was recursive and probably int he end the standard one, but it involved quite a bit of pseudo-arguing with the interviewer. I have a fear I may have come off a bit stubborn. In any case, I think the interviwer was impressed, judging by the conversation as we walked to grab a drink. It was about 4:45pm by now.

The next interview was with the manager for the Works SDET group. I knew as soon as I heard of another interview that I had a chance, that this one was it. The rumor is that the longer you get to stay the higher your chances of getting an offer, and those who are allowed to interview with a Manager at the end of the day have a basic cleat slate when they enter that last office. Supposedly, the Manager has the e final say on whether the person should be hired, but getting to this point means you had enough "hires" from earlier in the day to warrant such an interview. I was prepared to give it my best.

The Manager is a young guy, and I wish I remembered his name because he seemed like a nice and truly bright guy, someone who probably deserved that position. We talked a bit about the fact that the Works group is fairly small, and that there are no Leads yet. The bulk of the interview was a coding problem. This was the first time I was asked to use correct C syntax.

Here is the problem: Write a function that prints out all sets of consecutive integers that add up to all and any numbers within a given range. For example, given a range of 4-9, your function must print out the fact that 5=2+3, 7=3+4, and 9=2+3+4 or 4+5. Yes, I immediately understood that this was meant to be a difficult problem. I was told we would spend about 20 mins on the coding, then stop where we were and talk about testing.

I set about looking at a few examples and looking for a pattern. Then I noticed that most numbers had subset sums that had a highest number less than half of the number (4 and 5 are half of 9). The interviewer pointed out that this was "about half", and I agreed. We agreed to work on the sub problem of finding a subset for one integer, because we can just loop through the range to find the rest. I pointed out the obvious lookup table, and that this was a huge memory drain, and I quickly moved on to an algorithmic solution. I thought and thought, and talked out loud alot. I probably said a number of stupid things, but eventually stumbled upon the fact that two integers each less than half of the sum, added up to to the sum we were looking for. For example, 2 is floor(5/2) and 3 is ceiling(5/2) and each add up to 5. Similarly, 4 and 5 work for 9. Thus, it seemed like I could write a function that took the middle two number for an integer, and check if those added up to it, then printed them out. There were problems with this thought, like the number 9 that has two such subsets, one consisting of two numbers (4,5) and the other of three (2,3,4). The interviewer prodded me until I figured out that I could extend my half, floor, ceiling idea to look for three possible integers, and four, and so on. Basically, the number/k when floored and cieled will yield numbers around number/k and are the only consecutive integers likely to add to the number.

I had alot of pseudo pseudo code on the board, and my interviewer asked me to try coding this so that if we found we were going in the wrong direction (a non implementable solution) we could try something else. So I began coding, and found that the algorithm was going to need a few nested for loops. The problem was figuring out the indexing for these loops, but eventually I think with the help of the interviewer we worked out a solution that seemed to work.

I sat down, very tired and drank some water. The interviewer asked me about testing this function. I gave some functional test cases, and suggestion how to stress/regression test this function, and add handling for errors such as non-integer arguments. I was prodded, however, repeatedly for a special test case. It turned out that number such as 9 would cause some problems with the function: my current solution assumed every number only had one subset of consecutive integers that added up to it. There was little modification needed however, and I would like to say by the time we ended out discussion on the topic we had a seemingly working solution. I could tell, however, that like my other interviews, this had taken a long long time. We spoke a bit about general testing topics: what an SDET does on a daily basis, and working at Microsoft in general.

Then I was told it was 6:30pm, and the interview was over. My initial reaction was disappointment: I spent the entire day thinking that if I was getting an offer, I would be informed before the end of this interview. I tried to salvage the situation, and talked to the Manager on our walk out about hoe many people they were hiring were going to fresh college grads compared to experienced industry people. I was buying time, but I dont know for what. We walked out to the lobby and he called the shuttle for me. I recall his last words were "Nice to meet you Umar. Good luck with everything." I sat on the sofa and finally took the chance to check my voicemail waiting for the shuttle. I called my dad. I watched this Indian guy who worked there talking on his phone, walking in and out of the building, swiping his card each time.

I realized what time it was when the shuttle came. The recruitment building was closing at 7pm, and it was probably 6:40pm when I got there. I felt for some strange reason that if I met the HR person I would be able to tell her my day went well, and would get an offer. I told the receptionist at the desk that I was to meet the HR person before leaving, and she said that although most ppl had left for the day, she would leave a message and if she did not hear back in 10 minutes I could go. I sat and played some Xbox. I ate some free candy. I avoided the receptionist. For about 20 minutes I had a completely irrational thought that meeting the HR rep before going home would get me this job. The receptionist finally got hold of me and let me know she had not heard back, so it was probably OK to go home, and that I should expect to hear back soon. I walked out to my car, and noted that the only other one in the lot was that kid I had seen before.

The rest is wishful thinking. I did not get the job after all.

takin it easy...

So the Microsoft interview went fairly well, but alas I did not get the job. Got through 6 interviews, the last with the manager for the Works group. Spent about two hours in his office discussing a problem, but I guess I was not good enough to get the job.

So the job hunt goes on. Got an offer from Dryden Flight Research Center out in Cali the other day. Kind of reluctant to accept, strangley, because they gave me an offer after the first interview. Infact, in the same day of the interview. Never seen the place, or met the people Id be working with in person, so it seems kind of strange. Talked it over with my good friend, and he thought that any job that is so quick to hire cannot be an interesting or worthwhile one. I agreed, but am kinda worried about what might happen if I keep turning things down like this.

Anyway, the market for people with a Computer Engineering background is very very hot right now, so InshaAllah I should not have trouble landing a decent job in a few months time. My friend made a good point when he reminded me that I dont have a family or any other real obligations to worry about, so it makes more sense for me to wait out a few months and get a good job rather than jump into a commitment that is a waste of time with no real room to expand into a leadership role. After thinking it over, I think he has a point. The first job you land out of college may be your most important one. Then again, I could be eating my own words in a few months when I am taking a mediocre position somewhere because I jumped ahead of myself and expected a $55k+ job with a Bachelor's and little experience in industry.

Graduate school would have been so much simpler, but I am kind of glad Im taking a chance to see the "real" world. Probably couldt stand another exam or homework assignment for a while.

On a lighter note. Seattle is a really nice town from what I saw of it during my Microsoft Vacation. Gonna spend some time on Craig'slist Seattle and see if I cant land another job there. The tech industry there seems fairly prolific.

the interviews are coming!

Had a phone interview with Citrix Systems today for an SDET position. If nothing else, it was good practice for the Microsoft interview.

The whole thing took about an hour. I got a call around 9am, and in my sleepy-confused state agreed to a technical interview in the afternoon, without prior knowledge of the topic. Figured it would involve C++, so I brushed up on that. Actually, more than half of it was Operating System related, and I felt so stupid for not remembering it all, having taken the class just last semester. Then again, I was not expecting to be tested on OS anytime soon.

Anyway, here are the questions/topics I can recall off the top of my head:

-Are you familiar with Citrix? Can you name a product? (I said GoToMyPC, even though I wasnt sure that was their product)

-Why would you like to work at Citrix?

-Linked Lists
-Arrays
-Heaps
-Give a pro and con for each of the above.

-What would you use a lnked list, array, and or heap for?

-In the Operating System sense, what is the program stack and the heap?
-How do you add something to a heap, what is the function?
-How do you "add" something to the heap in the OS sense (dont ask, I dont know what that means)?

-What is a semaphore and a mutex? What is the difference between them, why and when would you use them?
-If you have a pair of threads that uses mutex/semaphores to avoid problems, what kind of deadlocks could still occur?
-Name a few ways to account for starvation (the deadlocks mentioned above)?

-What is DHCP?
-What is DNS?
-If your browser/local server cannot resolve a URL, what does it do?

SDET questions:

-What is an Automated Testing Software?
-What kind of problems do automated testing software encounter?

-We have a new feature for our Remote Desktop software, one that not only allows for a client to connect to a server and interact with the server as if it were a local mahine, but now the client's harddrive can be mapped to the remote server also.

-Name some problems this may cause. Name test cases you would look for. What kind of functionality would a customer expect?

-Describe a progam that would test Windows Notepad. What kind of test cases would you run?

Thats all I can think of right now.

I am gonna start studying now for the Microsoft interview. OS, data structures, C/C++, and finally I have to do research into Microsoft's products past, present, and future. Hope I have enough time.

Have to brush up on my digital logic before the IEEE Conference also.

I think im coming down with something flu-like. InshaAllah it will be gone before the interview.
My cousin, a freshman at Tulane, wants to withdraw becuse he has been sick for four weeks, and the doctors dont know what he has. He thinks he has missed so many classes that he cannot get a good grade. I hope he gets better. If he can just take the finals, and convince his profs to let those be his grades, I think he can ace all his classes. Hes a bright kid.