I don't typically like to discuss my University career ... I'm just very private.
I went to FSU for my undergraduate and majored in Pure Math and minored in Computer Science. For a while, I was a double major with my other major being Actuarial Science. I saw it as a backup job lest I was unable to find a job. However, although very lucrative, I didn't find it sufficiently interesting to pursue and I also did poorly in the Financial Accounting course. Inspired by Yoni and personal interests, I went to University with Pure Math in mind. I want to be a research professor and looked to Pure Math initially. Unfortunately, after several conversations with Pure and Applied Math faculty as well as graduate students, I found Pure Math to be a poor choice for research. It's very difficult to find a research position for Pure Math and very difficult to get funding. Even though I majored in Pure Math, I opted to take mostly applied courses such as PDEs and Numerical Analysis. My only true Pure Math course was Abstract Algebra. Everything else was universally fundamental to mathematics.
One of my main motivations for picking FSU was a Florida Bright Futures Scholarship. It paid 75% of my tuition for four years. The other 25% I helped cover by working at the Math Help Center. Whatever I couldn't afford, my father covered. FSU also advertised opportunities in undergraduate research which is another factor in my choice of this University. I had many opportunities to work as an undergraduate researcher. I saw my first opportunity to work on Chaos Theory related work ... however, despite my impressions of the field, I didn't find it very interesting and also didn't recognize the opportunity I was given. During my junior year, I took DIS Numerical Analysis II and developed part of a fluid code for breaking waves ... Unfortunately, I never finished it and it was way over my head. I was also given the opportunity to work on fluid-related research in Japan for two weeks (again, way over my head). The professor who administered my DIS referred me to some big shot professor who offered me an RA position. I gave up my job as a Math Help Center assistant and worked for him. This professor works mainly with PhD students and Post Docs and had unrealistic expectations initially. While working for him, I worked on his variant of Monte Carlo quadrature as well as Model Aggregation for Hurricane Prediction using Evidence Theory (his Post Doc's work).
This former adviser of mine was affiliated with the School of Computational Science (which later became Department of Scientific Computing). Computational Science And Engineering, not to be confused with Computer Science, is a [newer] field that specializes in numerical computation. This involves elements of Applied Math and Computer Science. Computational Scientists have an intimate understanding of computer architectures, data structures and algorithms, data and task parallelism, numerical stability and accuracy, and numerical algorithms as well as the mathematical theory that backs it. Most Computational Scientists tend to specialize in fluid dynamics (at least here). Anyway, I chose to stay at FSU as a Computational Science PhD student. Unfortunately, I did not work well with my former adviser, nor did I share his interests and so I switched advisers. My current adviser is a Computer Vision/Machine Learning expert and I primarily work on Machine Learning research. With regard to Computer Vision, I have dabbled in Face Detection and Lymph Node detection.
One of the perks of this field is that I get to play with both math and HPC technology. I have written applications that run on everything from multi core machines (40 core), GPUs, all the way to super computing clusters. I love the mix of math and computers in my work! I most especially love making things very fast and numerically stable and accurate.
This has been one of the best times in my life! I love the work and I hope that I can find a research position somewhere in the near future!
P.S. As a graduate student of a science field, my tuition is pretty much waived and I receive a stipend for living expenses.
