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Wonder who was his advisor back then, because I don't think it's mentioned in the thesis. Or he did this on his own, which is not surprising by the way.
https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/1033874204548984833?s=21
It's really impressive that Jeff accomplished so much despite going to UMN for undergrad.
It's really impressive that Jeff accomplished so much despite going to UMN for undergrad.
Non-American here -- what is wrong with UMN? I visited once, and it seemed like a decent university.
It's really impressive that Jeff accomplished so much despite going to UMN for undergrad.
Non-American here -- what is wrong with UMN? I visited once, and it seemed like a decent university.
It's really impressive that Jeff accomplished so much despite going to UMN for undergrad.
An underappreciated aspect of this is finding an academic department that would allow you to submit something this concise as a senior thesis. My experience, mostly in grad school, was that anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage. If you only needed a short, one-sentence paragraph to say something, it just wasn’t accepted. There had to be more. Jeff Dean is an uncommonly good communicator. But he also benefited f…
Also, I had to be submit 3 identical hard-bind copies of that bullshit report.
It's really impressive that Jeff accomplished so much despite going to UMN for undergrad.
Also, not all intelligent American kids can or want to go to elite schools, even if they are academically qualified. In the U.S., you often hear stories of kids turning down really good schools for ones they felt were a better "fit" (financially, culturally, etc.). And unlike the rest of the world, elite colleges in the U.S. are often private and expensive. Despite need-blind admissions, not everyone can afford them without going into heavy debt. (many middle-class parents make just enough money for their kid to not qualify for substantial financial aid).
So kids go to schools they can afford.
One of my college professors (who attended Princeton and MIT) once told me that in his observation, the top 5 percentile students in (good) state schools aren't that different from the kids who went to Princeton or MIT. I didn't believe him at the time, but having worked with different folks over the years, my experience inclines me to believe that there's some truth in that observation.
Owing to its population and economy, the U.S. has a large enough talent pool that the top percentile students at large, well-funded state schools (of which UMN is an example) are plenty smart. If you were to meet the really smart top-5-percentile kids from such state colleges (I have), you'd have no doubt that many of them could have attended MIT or CMU.
To be sure, good colleges can give you a headstart in life -- but it's what you do with that advantage that counts.
--
Examples of smart computer folk who went to decent, but non-elite schools for undergrad:
Doug Crockford (Javascript), SFSU
JJ Allaire (ColdFusion, Rstudio, etc.), Macalester College
Ward Cunningham (Wikis), Purdue
Rich Hickey (Clojure), SUNY Empire State (though he did go to Berklee College of Music)
John Carmack (Doom, Quake), U. Missouri Kansas City
Sergey Brin (Google), U. Maryland College Park (before Stanford)
Larry Page (Google), U. Michigan (before Stanford)
Dave Cutler (VMS, Windows NT), Olivet College
Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), U at Buffalo
Ryan Dahl (Node.js), UCSD, then U Rochester
Larry Wall (Perl), Seattle Pacific U (before Berkeley)
Alan Kay (Smalltalk, windowing GUIs), U Colorado, then U Utah.
Brendan Eich (Javascript, Mozilla), Santa Clara U (before UIUC)
An underappreciated aspect of this is finding an academic department that would allow you to submit something this concise as a senior thesis. My experience, mostly in grad school, was that anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage. If you only needed a short, one-sentence paragraph to say something, it just wasn’t accepted. There had to be more. Jeff Dean is an uncommonly good communicator. But he also benefited f…
My undergrad "project"'s report had to be of some minimum page count (about 300, I recall). I remember filling the report with the W3C specification of HTTP, Wikipedia articles and what not in order to convince the professor that I had done some "work" in order to build the project (It was based on using a interactive genetic algorithm for generating CSS files for webpages). Also, I had to be submit 3 identical hard-…
An underappreciated aspect of this is finding an academic department that would allow you to submit something this concise as a senior thesis. My experience, mostly in grad school, was that anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage. If you only needed a short, one-sentence paragraph to say something, it just wasn’t accepted. There had to be more. Jeff Dean is an uncommonly good communicator. But he also benefited f…
Wonder who was his advisor back then, because I don't think it's mentioned in the thesis. Or he did this on his own, which is not surprising by the way.
https://twitter.com/jeffdean/status/1033874204548984833?s=21
Kudos to University of Minnesota (@UMNews) Honors Program. Earlier this year, I asked Prof. Vipin Kumar, my advisor for this work, if he still had a copy, since I had lost my copy. He didn't, but checked with the Honors Program and eventually got a very nice response saying: "Jeff and Prof. Kumar, Here is a pdf copy of the thesis in question. We digitized our physical library about 8-10 years ago and no longer keep hard copies of anything. Hope this is what you are looking for."