this time of the year: Overview

So this is the time of the year; a circle ends and another is about to begin. Classes are over and the whole academic year just came to an end. This time tomorrow I will be flying to happiness or in other words I will be flying back to my country. I will meet my family, my friends, my ex-girlfriends, my ex-ex girlfriends and whoever wants to see me. I feel quite excited because I think I deserve this trip. I believe that it's a good time to write about this year. This time I will do it publicly for the purpose of this blog (see the title).

Hm, let's start; my plan is to cover so from the summer of 2010 to the current one. The last year review as I can see in my notes ended to the time that I was leaving for Spain. OK I guess that's a good point to start. In this first post, I will just cover the highlights of the year; however, I will write down my thoughts about individual important events in following posts.

Spain: I was the first three months of the last summer; it wasn't a very fruitfull experience. I was working on this big European ISP trying to do some research. The collaboration with the people there wasn't easy neither exciting. I didn't like I was there in the first place because I wanted to spend the summer in MD with my back-then dream-girl. As you can see there was a love story running in the background. I remember how miserable I was during my time in Spain. I was waiting the time to pass and return back and meet her. The project I did there it was ridiculous, it didn't seem to have strong motivation and the people here wanted to apply patches just to make it look better. The idea wasn't bad but it really wasn't something that was working. I am writing all these because I had the feeling that it was a really bad project; however, after some months it got accepted in a really big networking conference without my name in the author list but more about that later.

After the end of the summer the academic year started with high hopes and tones of excitment about a new beginning and a fresh start; it was like the summer of 2009 but this time I knew the ropes and I had a girlfriend. However, this strong feeling of optimism didn't really lead somewhere. After three months, I had no girlfriend, I was with new advisor and for the first time I felt that I'm close to depression. How I reached from the high excitment to the rock bottom point(of this year) It is something that will write in a later post. As sneak preview I can write that research is hard, life in school is harder, and dealing with those two and your life is sometimes very tricky.