My job involves visiting colleges. I visit for all sorts of reasons. Mainly I visit to talk to faculty about research projects or curriculum issues. I try to tell them about Microsoft products and how they can fit into what they are doing. A lot of one to one meetings but sometimes group meetings or even presentations to groups.
But I’m on campus for other things to. I was at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) the other day for an awards night because Microsoft had sponsored the contest in part. That was fun. I spent time at the dinner before the ceremony talking to a CS major and several faculty members. On the walk from dinner to the awards ceremony I had a very pleasant discussion about how much more interesting programming languages had become in recent years with a professor of CS.  Things are really moving in programming languages and keeping up with new things in languages like Java and C# and systems like .NET are making it a lot of fun on multiple levels.

Tonight I was at the University of Connecticut giving a talk to a group of students. Tim, our fantastic SA at UConn and the New England lead SA, set it up. Great room with super A/V set up. But the crowd was the highlight. Something over 40 students showed up for my talk on ASP .NET. Speaking to student groups is probably the best part of my job and nights like tonight are why.

The audience was very attentive and asked some great questions. ASP .NET and .NET in general was pretty new to most of them. I think they were impressed with what they saw. It is so easy to create web applications with Visual Studio .NET. And I showed a couple of neat little tricks with the IDE and some things that C# does that are different. You can’t use a ToString method with a formula in Java without putting the result in an object first but you can in .NET.

After the talk several students stayed around to ask questions and talk about CS issues. Very stimulating conversation and I quite enjoyed it. Of course it made Tim and I miss all the pizza. It was all gone before we left the conference room. I filled up on my way to the talk so I was ok. Poor Tim had to go find some food before he went back to studying. Finals next week. I had a two hour drive home and a sick mother in law to take care of or I't have taken him to dinner. Next time I hope I can make it up to him.

Colleges are exciting places. They have a high level of energy. There are so many learning experiences – in and out of class – to take advantage of. I want to go back to school. Student or faculty – I don’t care which. Well maybe one of these days I’ll talk Microsoft into paying my salary and my tuition in some doctoral program. Id like to study social computing and the society of the internet Yeah, that would be the best of everything.