Statement of Purpose (S.O.P) is probably the most annoying thing in the graduate school application process. It is very important because it is your only opportunity to speak up for yourself. You have to structure your essay carefully and explain why you are the best and why you’re that awesome for the program and unfortunately you have to manage all of these in 500 words (or a bit more for some schools).

Hopefully, the application process is over and the only thing to do now is a long wait. I would like to thank to Suzan Uskudarli, Arman Aksoy, Sarp Centel, Duygu Ozpolat and Elif Surer for their help on my S.O.P.

I created a wordle cloud from my statement of purpose for Carnegie Mellon. The distribution of the topics seems fine ;) (click on the image to see larger version).

Note: Wordle is a powerful and fancy tool for creating word clouds. –> Wordle.net

By mid of November, I left my job after working two years at TUBITAK UEKAE. I worked with one of the best Open Source teams in Turkey and led Pardus Security Team, therefore I am a bit sad about leaving that early..

Fortunately, the reason for leaving my job leads me closer to my dreams: I have been selected as a Fulbright Ph.D. fellow and hopefully, I am going to continue my education in USA next year. As I am currently doing my master degree at Computer Engineering Department, Bogazici University, I had to give my full energy and time to finish my education in Turkey, so I decided to contribute Pardus as a non-TUBITAK employee. >>

Therefore, I will continue my career in Perceptual Intelligence Lab. at Bogazici University and continue work on my master thesis with Prof. Ethem Alpaydin on Machine Learning.

I also would like to thank to all of my colleagues who supported me to apply for Fulbright fellowship and to take the right decisions for my career. Everything is gonna be awesome! =]

* From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Whenever I try to be a stable blog writer (one post each month seems fine, huh? =)) I just FAIL. So I’ll write a summary of last few months, ..

• A couple of days ago, I got the following e-mail from Google Diversity Team that was saying I am one of six award winners to attend linux.conf.au:

  Thank you for your application to the Google-Linux.conf.au Diversity Delegates Programme. After careful review by a committee made up of Linux.conf.au organizers, Linux Chix, and representatives from Google – your application has been selected as one of the 6 award winners!

  I had a list of talks in mind to attend @linux.conf.au. But unfortunately, it seems I can hardly get the visa on time (remember the MySQL case -and other side of the coin.. *click*)

  Wonderful news.. but,.. well.. just news. =)

• * It’s 19th of Jan. but I forgot to tell you Project 366 was succesfully finished! I started Project 366 just for want of trying, but lately it became a long-year album. I see how Photojojo was right. It’s an amazing way to document travels and accomplishments, relationships, .. and so on. Time moves surprisingly fast.

  Btw, i made a video from all Project 366 photos:

  
  Project 366 (2008) from Pinar on Vimeo.

• I have some supercalifragilisticexpialidocious plans about school, ah.. frak school.
• And at last, I started to use KDE4 on my daily system, but it’s more like a mutant (using Nautilus as a file manager is enough?)