Again, it's been a long time since I wrote last time. Things went unexpectedly and I've found myself in a position nowhere near I imagined.
I said that I applied Boğaziçi University for masters but although all of my qualifications were well above most of the applicants, I got rejected because that I did not bring a reference letter from my thesis advisor. Well, I went to him and he was off the office so I took the letters from my other professors. I thought these letters would be enough as they even admit students with 2,77 / 4.00 GPA! So reference letter should not have been a major issue. But it seems like it was.
Meanwhile, I had some job interviews but could not find an appropriate position according to my taste :)
Then my ex-professor who transferred to Kadir Has University from Işık University (where my BSc is from) offered me a position in his funded project. I was going to do my masters in Kadir Has University and get paid for working on the project. I accepted and started working. We are working on Graph Drawing and Visualization of Bioinformatics Networks. I'm using Pardus Linux and Python for my implementation works and I'm really happy about that. Thanks to my advisor who lets me be free on choosing my tools.
Our team consists of 3 members: me, my professor Cesim Erten and my ex-school-mate Melih Sözdinler. After I joined the team, I've done the unfinished part of their work and we submitted it to a conference and it got accepted. I'm really happy about that. I'll write about the paper when it's officially published (in February 2010).
My new university is pretty infant compared to my ex but I like it. At least everybody seems to be much more friendly. The biggest problem for me is that it takes 2-3 hours to get there and that much to come back home via public transport although we are in the same city. So I'm going to school on limited days.
Fall term is about to finish. I've taken Parallel Programming from Computer Engineering (my) department and Operating Systems, System Programming courses from IT department. They are mostly homework and presentation based. I've done my presentation on Parallel Sorting algorithms last Friday and it was good.
So, I'm a unofficial research assistant from now on. Great!
