Studying at the Georgia Institute of Technology

In the fall of 2017, after having handed in my bachelor thesis at the Technical University Munich, I started an exchange semester at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. At that point, except for vacations, I hadn’t left Germany for a longer period of time since I graduated from high school in the United States. Needless to say, I was very excited to come back. Through the CDTM program in Munich, I became aware of the Research Network Operations Center at Georgia Tech and managed to get accepted as a Visiting Researcher. Due to the fact that their research areas align quite nicely with my thesis topic, it was a pretty decent fit for both parties. My time at Georgia Tech was basically split up evenly between research and coursework. For me, this was the first semester in college where I could freely choose the courses I wanted to take. Having attended Worcester Academy, I had already learned to appreciate the benefits of freely designing your own course plan, so I was very excited about this compared to the more rigid structures in Germany.

Georgia Tech#

Georgia Tech, short for the Georgia Institute of Technology, was founded in 1885 and is located in the heart of Midtown Atlanta. With roughly 25,000 students it is one of the larger technical universities in the US and consistently ranks among the top ten public universities in the country. The College of Engineering and the School of Computing are the strongest programs — both usually land in the top five nationally. What makes the campus feel a bit different from most US schools is how embedded it is in the city. Tech Square, just across the highway from the main campus, is where a lot of the research institutes and startups are concentrated, which blurs the line between university and industry in a way I found pretty interesting.

Research Network Operations Center#

I spent most of my time at the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center, or in short, GT-RNOC. The RNOC is led by Russ Clark and Matthew Sanders. It is a research institute located at Tech Square right in midtown Atlanta and just over the highway from the main campus. The main focus of their work is in the area of mobile application systems, networked devices, and the internet of things. They also run a smart home setup that serves as a testbed for various IoT projects. The team is quite interdisciplinary — people come from engineering, computing, and design, and a good amount of the work is done in cooperation with external companies.

My Work#

During my time at Georgia Tech, I had the chance to work on multiple different projects and applications. As a visiting researcher at RNOC I created a new cluster management system as a self-serve platform based on OpenShift Origin.

For my own research project I evaluated the applicability of existing orchestration frameworks in the area of IoT. I set up a small Raspberry Pi cluster and evaluated the performance of some of the major orchestration providers. If you are curious about my research projects in general, you can find more on my research page.

Finally I took part in the Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC) at Georgia Tech. With our application Avocado we won the 2nd prize in the category Health & Wellness.

(project poster)

My Life#

Of course, apart from the work I did at the RNOC, I also had the chance to explore the social life surrounding Georgia Tech and Atlanta. Early in the semester I went through fraternity orientation, which was interesting to witness up close — it is quite a different culture from what I was used to in Germany. Football season was another highlight: watching the Yellow Jackets play at Bobby Dodd Stadium in the fall is a pretty big deal around campus and I enjoyed every minute of it. I also made it out of the city a few times — a hiking trip through Tennessee was a great way to decompress after a long stretch of work.

Outlook#

Right now, after having enjoyed the holidays back home, I am at MIT in Boston doing another exchange, after which I plan to return to Munich to continue my master’s degree. Let me know if you have any questions or want to learn more about life as a visiting researcher.