Whew! It has been a long time since I last posted anything to my blog, but it is mainly due to the fact that the majority of week 12 I was in New York City. I had an extremely fun time while I was there. Vermont Tech paid for everything on the trip with the exception of food. Some of my friends and I were given paid-for access to the Interop conference in New York City. The conference is basically made up of various large business promoting their newly developed technologies to other businesses, but we got to see some of these technologies as students. It was a pretty cool conference. One of the booths was for a single computer chip that was driving 256 different HD videos through 4 separate HD monitors with them all playing at the same time. We all thought that was quite cool, but another booth actually showed off a network monitoring program that can track every device that is connected to a network. The company behind it, known as Splunk>, had a live feed running that showed a map of the world and a red dot for each person in the world who was trying to hack into the Interop conference at that point in time. We saw dots all throughout parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The east coast of the United States was also filled quite heavily with red dots. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco all had booths at the conference showing off various developments. There was also a booth based on a new type of search engine. Most search engines, like Google, have you enter in keywords and then a list of related websites is returned to help you find the answer. This new search engine, called WolframAlpha, actually takes the keywords you have entered and spits out all the relevant information it can find based on extremely complex mathematical algorithms. It is really cool! I entered in my birthday and it gave me a list of related information based on my birthday. Give it a shot! WolframAlpha.
We also got to walk around the city quite a bit. By Tuesday night my legs and feet were absolutely killing me from all the walking I had done that day, but I loved being in the city. The college paid for our hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey, a tour for all of us to go to the top of the Empire State Building, and even a trip to Ellis Island to see the Statue of Liberty. :D I took a lot of amazing photos. I had been to Boston before this. I thought that Boston was pretty cool, but like most people who have been to New York City say-- nothing compares to New York City. It is the largest and most populated city in the United States. Over 8 million people live there, and over a million people work in Wall Street alone. The Wall Street crowd gets out at 5pm, so we made absolutely sure we weren't near that area around that time because that is when things get a bit 'crowded.'
Normally I only post a single picture with my posts. I do this to keep things interesting, but I also limit myself because I know that the Blogger (the host site for this blog) limits how much space I have available to me. I am going to make an exception though. I had such a great time in New York City, and I feel it is important that it is known that Vermont Tech pays for trips like these, so I am going to post a couple more pictures at the end of this post from the top of the Empire State Building. :D
As my final topic: I have two weeks left of classes for this semester and then I have a week of final exams. Final exams are always stressful, but it is easy to be optimistic because we all know that after we are done with our exams we are able to go home for Christmas vacation for a solid 3 weeks of laziness. I am definitely looking forward to it. I am pretty sure that we were given an extra vacation this year, but maybe that is just me. We had last week off, and the week before that is when I went to New York City (6 hour ride by the way...), so it is crazy to think that in a few more weeks we will have a few weeks off. :D
Also: A HUGE thanks goes out to Lauri Sybel for making this trip happen. Lauri is the Career Services Counselor at Vermont Tech., and I am pretty sure that she has played the biggest part in Vermont Tech's famous job placement rate. Vermont Tech has had a 98% job placement rate for students within four months of graduation, and they have maintained that for over 15 years straight. These are jobs that are related to the students majors, and have shown great success.
UPDATE: Pictures wouldn't load for some reason. May try again later. :P
