Cosu

So over two months have passed since my last update. I was either  busy or not in the mood to update my blog. I will try to make up for lost posts somehow…

I’m now enrolled to the System and Network Engineering Master at University of Amsterdam. How I got here?

It started in January last year when my lovely girlfriend showed me the the http://www.os3.nl web page. I have a strong background in networking and system administration and I was very excited after I read the master presentation. I decided that I should apply for the master!

To apply, a number of difficult steps had to be made. The first one was taking the TOEFL test. TOEFL (test of English as a foreign language) is a simple assessment of your English language knowledge. It does not test grammar or advanced vocabulary. The test has 4 sections : reading, listening, speaking and writing. Preparation materials can be found in certain sources and more than a few days of “training” are more than enough. The difficult part is the very long duration: 4 hours! When I left the testing I barely knew what my name was and where I should go next. After about 3 hours I almost lost motivation. My only wish was to get it finished because I was bored and pissed off.  The results are posted on the TOEFL web site after about 3 or 4 weeks. They need to be sent to the University in a timely manner separate from the application documents. Sending the results the first time is free. Additional submissions are not. The cost of the TOEFL course was about 170$. Besides the actual test, extra care must be taken when registering for the test. The number of seats is limited and reservation must be made in advance. I was very lucky to book in February and take the test at the beginning of March. Booking should be made with a few months in advance to be sure to get a seat.

Now that I was done with TOEFL, I sent my actual application form. There is a pre application form on the UvA website which must be filled in with personal data, unofficial transcripts and a letter of motivation. I believe that the preform is a method of screening the applicants. If you pass this phase, in a few weeks an official form is sent to you by email. This one must be printed and filled in. I had to obtain official transcripts from my University (PITA), two letters of recommendation ( I got them from two of my professors: Nicolae Tapus and Razvan Rughinis), a CV and another letter of motivation. I sent them and began to wait for the answer. It should have arrived at the end of May but it didn’t. After some more waiting I was informed that I had to take an intake test (see the OS3 web page – admission). The intake test consisted of 6 sections: TCP/ Networking, Discrete math(logic, set theory, graph theory),Unix, English writing (I had to make a brief on the TELNET RFC), English comprehension (some questions about the content of the RFC) and bash scripting. The first three were “pick the answer” kind of tests while the 4th and 5th involved typing text. The last one required creating working bash scripts. Nothing too fancy : use of the standard Unix tools (cut, grep,tr, sed, awk) and some knowledge on bash scripting (ifs, loops, etc). I took the test at the beginning of  August, after 2 months of waiting. The result came after about two weeks: I was accepted!

During the admission process, the communication with the SNE staff and the International Officer at UvA was excellent. I was very pleasantly surprised. My previous contact with University officials from Romania was not that positive …

I can’t give information on any scholarships as I applied too late. Application for a scholarship has to be made sooner. Check with the  International office!

A bit about the SNE OS3 master. There are only two masters programmes in Europe that have a system and network engineering track. SNE at UvA is one of them. The second one is in Oslo, Finland. This aspect makes this education to stand out from all the rest. The setting in which it takes place is also special. It lasts for one full academic year. There is an option to follow the master in two years as a part time student. More on that later. Back to the setting. In most universities students have to follow a mandatory “core” course pack which is directly connected to the master track. Additional courses can be picked form a very large pool depending on the student’s interest in various fields. This means that certain courses may overlap or some blocks/semesters can be busier than others. At SNE, there is no option in choosing the subjects. The list of subjects is decided beforehand for a very good reason: the SNE courses are available only to SNE students. Any other students are not allowed to participate. Also the schedule is very strict: 10-16 everyday (with a 30min – one hour lunch break ). During the morning, a lecture is given and in the afternoon students work on assignments related to the before given lecture.

The Dutch educational system organizes the academic year into blocks. A block has 8 or 4 weeks. At SNE, during one 8 week block, 2 courses are given, twice a week. The lectures take place during the first 7 weeks while exams are taken in the 8th. So two exams in October and two exams in December. In Romania I had 5  or 6 courses over a period of 14 weeks with 3 weeks of exams. The learning process is accelerated while the focus is kept on only two subjects. I still don’t know which approach is better.

The master thesis is split into two Research Projects. One is in January and another one in June. The projects take place at different companies and they can involve a number of subjects (security, large scale systems, networking, etc).

The SNE lab is open only to SNE students. The lab has two rooms, a lecture room and a server room. The lecture room has dual screen eco-friendly workstations for each student while the server room houses racks with experimentation servers for the students. Each student has his own 1U server and his own /27 public IP space. Lectures are given by the SNE staff but on several ocasions guest lectures from people with more expertise in a particular field are given.

The mix of students is still primarily Dutch with only 4 international students. I have another colleague from Romania (he studied in Timisoara at UPT), a pole and a chinese guy. The low number for internationals is because this was the first year when admission was open to foreigners.

The master can be finished in two years, as a part-time student. The part-time is a bit tricky as part-time means that you still have to be 3 full days at school. You get one course per block and also you can choose when to make the reaserch projects.

Untill now I had two courses: Essential Skills for Administrators(ESA) and Classical Internet Applications(CIA).

The ESA course was a crash course into stuff that normally should have been known from a previous education. It’s role is to set a common set of knowledge in regards of using an Unix environment, for all the students. The subjects treated are: versioning systems(cvs,svn,git), LaTeX (to create fancy documents), regex’s ,sed & awk (to process text files), xhtml/css/xml/xslt and three programming languages that can also be verywell used for scripting : Python, Perl and Ruby. The programming languages are presented from a basic OO level keeping language specifics to a minimum. The exam consists of a number of non-trivial questions and a practical part where the student must make use of LaTeX and xhtml.

The CIA course is more theoretical. It focuses on Unix and Internet history. The “classical” means that the course tackles protocols and standards that are at the core of the internet. It first starts with partitioning  by presenting various partitioning schemes (from DOS to GPT , Disklabels, Apple  ), CHS and LBA etc, goes to booting (ARP, RARP, BOOTP, DHCP), DNS , email, HTTP and lastly Directories. Without a doubt the most interesting part of this course was the DNSSEC chapter. DNSSEC is a very hot topic and therefore we spent 2 lectures on it of which one was a guest lecture from a SurfNET representative (Surfnet the equivalent of Roedu, the national education and research network).The exam consists of questions from the lectures.

The  teaching is of very high quality, yet the class atmosphere is not rigid. Dutch people have a way of making you comfortable while still being distant and polite. Working in such an exclusive environment means that contact with the other colleagues is more intense than in a normal master setting.

Certain aspects resemble my previous education at UPB but I feel that overall more effort is made by the professors.

For each course certain assignments are given. These assignments must be completed in order to be able to pass the course. They do not count to the grade in any way but not doing them in a sufficient manner means that you will fail the course. Evaluation of the assignments is made in a very straight forward way: RED/YELLOW/GREEN. If you get red you still have time to change/add stuff until the end of the block. Also there are no deadlines in completing the job except for the end of the block. The assignments involve a lot of hours of work as things have to work and they also need to be documented. Each student has to keep a log of his work. The log gets “graded” so doing a sloppy job in documenting even though everything works might still get you a red. A frustrating aspect is that there is no clear marking on how  red , yellow or green are given. On some assignments I spent a lot of time which translated in a “nice” or “excellent” comment but for getting just green with no comments only half of the effort was necessary. I lack good time management skills so I had to finish  some assignments in the exam week. This might get stressful and it also might affect the actual exams. Relaxed deadlines are a two edge sword…

My logs are publicly available here: https://www.os3.nl/2009-2010/students/cosmin_dumitru/start

It’s hard to give a strong opinion after two months. Right now things are getting more interesting as the following courses are far from basic. UvA has a partnership with Vrije University and so one of my mandatory courses is at Vrije. It’s called Distributed Systems and the lecturer is Marteen van Steen one of the authors of “Distributed Systems : Principles and Paradigms”. The second course I’m having this block is called Security of Systems and Networks. We will have about 10 guest lectures from various people on security and security related stuff.

The SNE functions like a group so the teachers seem more dedicated to the students. One example of this fact is the trip we’re going to have in December. All the students and professors will travel to Geneve to visit the LHC at CERN. Almost everything is payed by the SNE. On a normal master you wouldn’t have such an activity and even if that would be the case financial support is out of the question for such a large group. Group activities are organized from time to time: beer meetings, movie nights, special events, etc. The atmosphere in the group is very friendly and very open. There are some small quircks as computer people normally have social skills isuess but it’s nothing I’m not used to or that it can’t be overcome.

I think SNE is a very good opportunity as the education is not disconnected from the real world yet it doesn’t rely on proprietary technologies.It’s very good to have knowledge of the inner workings of Microsoft or Cisco but after some point the knowledge can’t be reused or easily adapted to some other context.

I will post some non-school related stuff at some point.

Sorry for the 2000 words posts!