I graduated from high school in the Philippines, some years ago (let's not be specific with the dates here). Got my Associates degree from Mt. Hood Community College back in 1998 and then my Bachelors in Computer Science(CS) from Portland State University a few years later.

I just recently received my Masters in CS at Northeastern University. Here's how the two-year program went for me:

Fall 2004 went pretty well, considering*. I took the following courses:

• Design and Analysis of Algorithms - This was a LOT of work. Thank goodness I survived!
• Computer Systems - This introduced me to device drivers. Pretty fun.
• Cryptography and Communication Security - I took an intro to cryptography class while I was doing my undergrad. This was a bit more involved. Really enjoyed learning about cryptanalysis in this course.
  
  *I was taking these three graduate courses at the same time, while working two part time jobs, which is almost equivalent to working full time. I would advise doing this only if you take pleasure in self-inflicted pain.

In Spring 2005, I was a TA for an introductory course in Computer Science for non-cs majors. I also completed the following courses:

• Principles of Programming Languages - This was a tough course for me. But I passed. What a relief!
• Network Security - Learned quite a bit from this course. Got to play with a lot of tools.

I successfully finished these courses in the Fall of 2005:

• Parallel Computing - My project was extending MPInu to include collective communication. This minimalist MPI implementation is part of TOP-C. My final report and deliverables can be found here.
• Network Fundamentals - Implemented a parallelized file transfer protocol for this class. A lot of work.

Finally, in Spring 2006, I took these two courses:

• Intensive Computer Systems - wrote our own system calls using User-mode Linux(UML).
• Reasoning About Security - this class did not have any homework or exams. But it involved giving a 1-hour presentation on a topic approved by the instructor and writing up a 10-page paper summary. If you're interested in learning about the topic I chose, these slides will give you the info you want.

So what's next??? Well, I have been meaning to learn a couple of new natural languages (possibly Spanish and something else), and learn to play an instrument(most likely piano). So I might very well find myself enrolled in a community college somewhere, taking language and/or music classes. Yes, I shall be a student forever!