What are /r/stevens' favorite Products & Services?

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Which shuttles? The 1700 Park shuttle is quite consistent. The other lines, not so much.

Grab this app or its iOS equivalent, TransLoc Rider, for real-time tracking of the various lines, except the Park shuttle. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.transloc.android.rider&hl=en

You'll have a better idea if the shuttle will actually be coming to get you.

1. this is how you fly cheaply. if you book far enough in advance you can catch LAX to EWR for $170 each way.( newark- closest airport to the school, but jfk is pretty close too, and because jfk is larger sometimes the flights are cheaper)
2. because you are from far away, the school might put you up with another student for the evening (but that might only happen after you get accepted)
3. as someone else mentioned, pick half a dozen schools to visit and interview on the east coast. and tour & interview all of them at the same time
4. there is not a huge amount of surfing, but there is snowboarding!

Go with personal preference. A lot of the bugs have been worked out with Win10.

Downsides of Win7 - it takes work to stop MSFT from forcibly upgrading you, 7/8/8.1 got the telemetry update so the spying has been backported, and all support (patches) ends in January 2020 (mainstream support has already ended). So basically one way or another you'll have to upgrade before you graduate.

Downsides of Win10 - many things are now forced with Win10 Redstone (Anniversary) - Cortana is forced to be on, telemetry cannot be turned off (not that it really could be originally, either), downgrade period is shorter (10 days), and so forth.

No matter which version you go with, install Spybot Anti-Beacon.

If you are CS (say hi!) make some room for a Linux installation as well, you'll thank me later.

Oh, and while I’m on it - you're going to receive a keycard which you'll use as an ID. Get a retractable keychain like this so you won't leave it in your room and lock yourself out (happened to me on the FIRST DAY)

It pretty much looks exactly like this https://www.amazon.com/CM-Storm-QuickFire-TK-Mechanical/dp/B00AOIRCI6 It hasn't gone through much wear and tear (I just wasn't a fan of the red switches). Fully Functional except for the pegs that make it stand up at an angle. The peg went missing because it was shipped loose.

Doesn't seem too intimidating to carry.

https://www.amazon.com/MyDigitalSSD-SuperSpeed-Portable-External-Storage/dp/B00EZ2FRP2/ref=sr_1_15?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1466706288&sr=1-15&keywords=external+ssd

Professor Salman is a good teacher and he strives to cover everything from zero but it wouldn't hurt to have a working knowledge of basic electronics. Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M Mims is a great primer (http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest-Mims/dp/0945053282). For 551 you have your choice of microprocessor for the final project so it definitely helps to have worked with one (arduino is my personal preference). I'm not sure how much the curriculum has changed since I took them so you might have exposure to arduino in circuits or d4, but I did not.

598 is very matrix math heavy so being comfortable with transformations is helpful. There's also a decent amount of Matlab coding, but it's mostly applying and modifying example code. I'd say if you're comfortable making a function and making code you find online do what you want to do you'll be fine. And you get to play with roombas with laptops strapped to them to do image processing which is pretty cool.

Sorry if I made these classes sound daunting, you can definitely go in cold and still do well, just sharing what I wish I had known before taking them.