Well finding an approriate lodging is such a big and important topic that my limited knowledge could only allow me to have a brief touch on the tip of the issue. But I’ll be glad to share with you what I’ve learnt so far.
I have lived on campus for one year and off-campus for three years. And currently I am living off-campus, since I used to think I can avoid the hassles of on-campus living, such as:

The inconvenience of sharing bedroom and sticking to campus food.

My having to find a lodging for the 2 week transition between the end of the SPring semester and the beginning of the summer session (since I don’t go home during the summer).

My not getting much out of residential activities (which was what I thought back then).

On the other hand, there are many advantages of living on-campus, such as:

Proximity to friends and campus.

The opportunity to participating in many residential organizations/events.

If a student lives on-campus for two semesters, he can apply to be a Residential Assistance and get a free (single?) room and meal stipend.

Access to dormitory gyms, computing centers, Resnet (the dorms’ intranet).

Especially for graduate students, all those I knew live in Chapin, which has air-conditioned apartments with a monthly rate of $350/month or something like that.

I find off-campus housing mostly through the school website, which gave me a good selections of places. The second source I might look for is on the bulletin boards, and another one is through friends.

Since I am a loner, living off campus does seem more comfortable for me. I’ve had three landlords so far, two of them are nice and the other is purely bad. Through them I’ve learnt some costly lessons in renting a room.

The first lesson I’ve learnt is life’s easier when you know some friends. At least you know some useful info from them, and at best you can find a good place through them.

The second lesson is to be able to spot the misers among the landlords. Having a mean landlord is the worst thing that happened to me. I was fooled by her sweetness when she showed me the room, ignoring the strict rules and conditions she mentioned in the renting terms. My stay at her place was an uneasy experience and I even lost my deposit eventually. Quite a costly lesson for me indeed.

I rarely have problems with room mates (or suite mates), since all suitmates I’ve had have been considerate people and we rarely see each other at all . In this aspect I could consider myself fortunate.

I hope this article gives you some useful information, and I wish you luck on finding good lodgings.

Overview:
From Manish (another blogger on this website), I learnt about the free festival in NYC called River to River festival , and I went there on August 4th 2006. I believe it takes place through August.

It’s definitely a fun-filled experience. What I remembered most is the privilege to taste the French dessert of snails and the live rock show in the Sea Port harbor. Definitely unforgettable. The only problem is that it takes too long to get around (it takes 2 hours to go from Stony Brook to NYC, and like 15’ to get from uptown to downtown in the subway. Plus on that day the subway platform was hot like a grill).

Details:

Coming to the city: From Stony Brook, my friend and I took the train to the city. My friends told me it’s the best way to get there. However, it takes 2 hours to go so we kept talking to each other to keep ourselves from falling asleep.

Visiting the French restaurant (its name is simply “Aâ€? – located between 106th st and 107th st and on Columbus Avenue): I’ve founded this restaurant from a restaurant guide website . We chose this because there are many review of it and it’s not expensive according to the website. From Penn Station, we take #1 train uptown to 103th street, walk up to 106th st and Columbus Avenue (hope it’s still there ). It’s a tiny restaurant with a tiny sign board that we couldn’t make it out in the first few minutes. The dining room is small and lit only by candles (romantic, huh?). I don’t remember there’s any music at all. We don’t have to wait too long for the food. There are about 8 courses for the dessert and about the same number for the main course. I had snail dessert ($8) and rabbit sausage ($12). Both taste good and left me quite an experience.

Visiting (free) live show @ Pier 17: we then took the #2 (or #1 or #3) train downtown to Wall St, then walked a few blocks to Sea Port Pier. This is part of the free River to River festival that I mentioned earlier. When we came, a crowd of about 500 had already gathered around to enjoy the live music, and some were dancing. We saw a long line of people lining up to buy iced beer, yeah good drink for a hot night. The pier at night was such a fantastic background for taking a picture. The concert was about 2.30 hour long.

Sidenotes:

1. at Penn Station, from the destination board we noticed a place on Long Island called Speonk. Wow, what a cool name to call!

2. The disposible camera I used gave me horrible pictures. Thanks to it, 21 pictures of the beautiful night life in NYC turned out to be too dark beyond all senses. I’ll never use disposable cameras again.

Pictures:

Jason and me at Sea Port Pier 17

What a view!

Jason trying to eat some “ice-cream”

Still hungry?

My summer is always long hot and boring. However, since I discovered the place, I now have somewhere to keep myself afloat. Yes sir, it’s the West Beach near the Stony Brook train station.

What a wonderful place to spend the evening! I frequent it almost every day. I feel secure to swim there - there are life guards from 10 AM to 5 PM, and the swimmable area, which is as big as a soccer field, is enclosed by floating bouys and strings, and there are swimmers, surfers, and boaters around. There are also bathrooms and even a playground for kids. The only bad thing is that they charge non-residents for parking ($15/day ).

You can use mapquest (West Meadow Beach is the menu item number 1) to get to the beach. Usually I start at the Stony Brook train station, then go along Quaker Path (on the Mapquest map it appears as the first vertical line on the right at the bottom), then to Mt Grey Rd and to West Meadow Rd and follow it to the end.

Here are some pictures taken recently:

The left side of the beach.
—————————————————

The center view.
—————————————————

The right side view.
—————————————————

Left: An icecream car standing between the kid’s playground and the bathroom ( …)

Swimming here is way better than in the school’s swimming pool (located in the Sport Complex building), which operates on limited hours. Come to think of it, I might not survive the long summers without this beach .

Hi guys,

Just a reminder that the Admission Office will hold a chat session on Wednesday, August 2nd from 7-9PM. The subject of this chat will be things to do on and off campus. Some of us bloggers will be participating too.

Hope to meet some of you there.

First of all, the school website does have a job section that you might want to browse through. You might also want to check out the business section of the school’s website.

In fact, Stony Brook University is one of the hot spot for recruitment of many banks and tech firms, both in the city and local. Last Spring semester (2006) there were two career fairs in Stony Brook last semesters, each of which involve quite a lot of recruiters, most of which were either IT or financial corporations like Citibank, VMware, Microsoft, etc. Besides, there are numerous presentations from different companies throughout the semester. We even have a Google presentation in Fall 2005, and some of the students got employed afterwards. I also got several job offers during the summer but I am lazy and nervous so I did not really try to take the chance.

You can practically get employed beginning with freshman year. On campus jobs are numerous: working in the SINC sites (i.e. the public computer labs), in the library, in the school offices, etc. A friend of mine even has a research internship in the Applied Math department even when she’s still in freshman year. Some of my friends get internships in IT companies in their junior year.
Two friends of mine also got research internships in the Hospital, probably by applying there directly. And they are in sophomore or junior year, I believe.
I also apply for a job through the Faculty Student Association, the organization that runs most of the services at this school (bookstore, catering, convenience store, etc). The secretary handling jobs application told me it’s hard to find a job ‘cause in summer time there’s lots of application. But the peak time for applications to pour in is in the Fall semester. This summer the Seawolves are hiring heavily so I got into there.

For off-campus jobs, the school’s Career Center will help you a great deal. I mean, a GREEAAAT deal! They have a well maintained website where new internships/interviews opportunities are updated every month (even in the summer). If you are registered to their service, they also send you emails on positions that tailored to your preference, which is amazing. Yes, the Career Center’s service is the best service I have in this school. SBU really does a great job in aiding us students in job-hunting.
However, before you can start applying your resume through the Career Center, you have to attend OCR (a kind of training session) where you’ll get registered to their service and you’ll be shown how to use their website. I did not pay attention in the meeting, so I missed some key instructions and I missed some job opportunities afterwards. Hehe, I deserved that .

I have spent almost 2 years studying Computer Science in Stony Brook University, and all I have to say about my experience is one word: SOLID! What I’ve learnt from the school is not only some tricks and tips to program better, but the essential skills to develop software. Many companies like Computer Associate, Citibank, Goldman Sachs plus a number of local business frequently appear in the school’s career fair each semester. Many IT companies, including Googles and Microsoft, give company presentations to the school. Some of my friends got employed with Goldman Sachs, Computer Associate, and even Google. I have not had any luck so far . There are also distinguished lectures on interesting topics each semester, which I missed.

Stony Brook has begun to get accredited with ABET (The Computing Accreditation Commission), and I think it will go well. SBU also had several times getting entrance ticket to the International competition for the ACM Programming contest. I hope in the future SBU will even make a name in the International game.

It takes about 4 years to graduate with a CSE/ISE undergrad degree at Stony Brook University. For undergrad level, the courses emphasize on sharpening students’ capability to design and develop software rather than sharpenning their programming skills, and a good amount of each course spent on practicing our skills. Teamwork is another big point in the curriculum, but it mostly involve in upper level courses. So to get straight A’s in these courses one not only need working hard but also need knowing some hard-working friends to team up in some courses. And, the school holds a VERY strict policy on academic dishonesty (last semester there’s a student who gave his friend a few lines of code to use in a project, and he was tried before the school’s commission and get expelled from the class).

Generally the difficulty of the course depend on the specific professor one is taking with, but the interesting courses are usually the hard ones. Most of the courses I took require frequent communication with the professor and the teaching assistants, since there are always unclear project specifications and difficult concepts. I like all the professors I knew, and I visited their office hour many times. They are very knowledgable and very accessible. All the professors come from respectable schools, including those like Standford, UC Berkeley, John Hopkins University, which helps explain the good reputation of SBU in this realm. I also frequent the teaching assistants for help with homework and class materials.

The introductory (100’s) level courses are easy and not really fun, but they gives me a good overview of anything from how the computer is organized to what the internet really is. The fun begins from the intermediate/higher level courses.

To me theory courses are not as fun as most of the programming courses, because they are dry as bricks and there are always weekly assignment to do.

I have only taken a handful of programming courses, and on the whole they are more fun and fairly easy, except some tough courses like CSE 219 with Prof. McKenna where I learnt about multi-threading application in Java. Most of the programming courses involve projects due in a week or two, and they require a bit self-study and a lot of communication (with your friends and with your professors) to get things done. Some high-level courses like Game Programming or Software Development requires working in group, which is quite tough luck for me because I don’t know many people here (I am now still freaked out because I will take CSE308 next semester). If only I got to know more people earlier on.

The language used in lower level courses (100’s and 200’s level) are Java, and I heard it is because Java is considered better to teach software design. However, higher level courses deal not only with Java but also with C/C++, Shell scripts, SQL, XSB Prolog, you name it.

Overall, I think that Stony Brook has a lot to offer both in terms of academic achievement and job opportunity for IT students.

If you are interested in further details you could explore more on the department’s website or contact the professors . You may also want to check the lab listings if you are interested in the school’s lab facilities. I did not have the privilege to access these labs, so I did not know much to share with you.

A few pictures:

An entrance to the building.

A corner of the File System Lab .

A corner of the CEWIT Lab .

Next time I will write about my (bad) luck with job hunting, so stay updated.

The school’s “Blockbuster” - what is it you might wonder? I go there every Friday to borrow movies to watch during the weekend. It’s located in the Main Library - Central Reading Room - and it’s technically called the DVD and VHS Circulations.In fact, I go there more often than going to the actual Blockbuster.

Why? Well it’s simply because of free service and it has more interesting movies there than the actual Blockbuster. By “good” I mean all the “artsy”, serious, and classics stuff, like the Criterion Collections, “Ran” or “Seven Samurai” by Kuroshawa, blah blah. Film buffs will definitely love this place, but for me an average viewer, its collections of “digestible” movies (like Blade Runner, Team America World Police, Collateral,…) are not as diverse as Blockbuster and not the most recent, but I still go there to browse ‘cause, as aforementioned, it’s free and I cannot find good movies for my tastes in the actual Blockbuster. Plus I can keep the DVD’s for a maximum of a month (except for the special VHS on the “reservation shelf).
So check it out, and you will find many interesting videos here.
Btw, you need to bring your student ID to borrow the movies. You can also check for the availability of a movies online using the online catalog called STAR

Here’s some pix of the place:

Main Library - front entrance
_____________________________________________________________

Main Library - Central Reading room
_____________________________________________________________

Central Reading Room - Video Circulation desk (inside Central Reading room)

Hi everyone,

My name is Hai Cong Nguyen and I am an undergrad in Computer Science. I am in senior year and I hope I will graduate next semester. I feel so eager and a bit nervous.

My current plan after graduating is to get a job, hopefully something about the web. Alternatively I might take the Ph.D. program if I come across some cool ideas to research on.

I am an international student from Vietnam. I transferred to Stony Brook two years ago, because I heard of the school reputation for its information technology curricula, and my years at Stony Brook help me confirm that.

It’s me in Washington DC 5 years ago.