At 11:41 AM 12/31/2002 -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote:
I only ask this because I'm deciding whether to study computational neuroscience or cryptography in grad school.
Are you planning to get a PhD and/or do research, or just a terminal master's degree to do engineering?
If you're planning to do research, definitely go for the computational neuroscience. The usual reasons to do research are to discover new and interesting things, or to break old and inaccurately-trusted things, or to have topics to publish papers about so you can be a professor at a major university. In computational neuroscience, you may be able to do these things. (I don't know the field, but it sounds like there are lots of open directions you could go with it.) In crypto, there are lots of really really bright people, lots of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, most of the standard techniques are good enough that the bar for "what's a fundamentally new and interesting discovery?" is at least up at the level of "discovering Elliptic Curve Crypto" and probably higher. Just doing a new symmetric-key algorithm that's an order of magnitude faster than AES isn't enough; we can do wire-speed crypto for most things that matter. Maybe the NTRU guy has something cool, if he can prove it to the satisfaction of enough people. Discovering a new technique that breaks things like AES might be good enough for a couple of years of papers, but you'll note that lots of people have been working on things like that. Doing a terminal master's degree to learn how to engineer cryptosystems and build tools that are secure and reliable is a different game entirely - do some other computer science things while you're at it - but skills that will help you do a better job of building programs are worthwhile, as long as school doesn't interfere too much with your job needs. I did a master's in Operations Research a couple decades ago, and found that it really added a lot to my perspectives and technical maturity, but the world was different back then...
michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred
