What the heck am I doing for the summer?

When graduating, it seems like everyone’s favorite question to ask you is “what’re you doing next?”, and rightly so. I wish I had a simple one sentence answer like “going to Google for the summer, then grad school in the fall” (which was my initial plan). Alas, it is not so. Rather than answer it a million times, I thought it best to blog what it is I’m doing.

Be warned everything I’ve been planning has a ton of uncertainty, so I guess I’ll update as things progress.

Initially I applied to lots of grad schools as a PHD in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). I did this because there are some interesting problems out there to solve, and I think I have the background to contribute solutions to these problems. I’m also very interested in Computer Vision (I’m taking a grad course in object recognition during this final semseter). I was planning to decide which track to pursue when I got into grad school. I really want to use Computer Vision and apply it to transportation research, and interviewed for a summer position in a research lab doing just that.

After all of the grad school application dust settled, it turns out I had opportunities to do Computer Vision at Purdue and to do either HCI or Vision at UMD. My initial intention was to move away from UMD, but it really has great programs in just the two topics I’m interested in — Vision and HCI, so doing research at UMD would be a sensible option. My advisor is excited about what I’m working on now (pen-based digital annotation research) and wants me to keep doing it as an HCI PHD.

I was going to decline both schools because I still need time to decide if the PHD is worth it to me and fits my career goals. However, I accepted at UMD and deferred admission for a year. So if I do go to grad school, it will probably be at UMD in either HCI or Vision and I’ll enter in Fall 2007.

So what am I doing in the mean time?

I could work in industry for a year, and have gotten some interest from all of the major companies I’d consider working for, but I feel like that would be more of the same. While in college, I’ve interned twice for Microsoft and once for IBM, and while these are great tech companies, I feel like I have to do something that’s “mine” — start up and work on problems that I’m really interested in solving. I don’t really want to “work for a company” =) at least not right now.

So essentially, what I really want to do is start a company. This desire is what is causing me to reconsider grad school, because it doesn’t directly help me fulfill that desire, at least in the short term. The time is ripe! I have nothing to lose, lots of ambition, and tons of resources and connections. And most importantly, this is the first time in four years I’ll be able to work in areas I’m interested in completely uninhibited by classes and internships. I want to see what I can accomplish with my full attention on something.

The plan is to work where I am now in MD, for at least the summer, while trying to get a company off the ground. I have a ton of good ideas and a few leads on venture capital if I need it, but I’ll try and bootstrap the firm from nothing if I can, so I don’t have to give away equity (after all, Gates was a bootstrap entrepreneur). All of these conditions coming together at once (graduation, bootstrap cash, fresh connections with the major industry companies from internships) make the startup route irresistable.

The exact business plan isn’t in stone, and neither is the product. I definitely want to do a product-based company rather than service-based (and “online web service,” like digg, is defined as a product in this case). What I really want to do is productize what I’ve been working on as research, since it’s fun, useful, and no one has done it yet. I’ve also got some other software brewing on the back burner that could come forward as a product.

I’ll also be visiting family in friends that I haven’t seen in awhile, and might work at the university under my advisor full-time for a portion of the summer to finish some of the research I’ve been working on, and try and publish a paper for the CHI conference.

So that’s the gist. Should be exciting!