Patrick Russell McElhiney - Homepage

Category: Pages
Hits: 4233

Dear Friends & Family,

This is news that I have been accepted into the Computer Science PhD program at the University of New Hampshire for the Fall of 2018, with significant scholarship. I will be graduating from UNH Manchester with a M.S. Information Technology degree – officially in September of 2018, while I will be walking in the graduation ceremony this May 17th, 2018 with high honors. I especially want to thank my family for all the support that they’ve provided me over the years – especially my mother, Diane Labrie. She has done countless things to support me, such as prepare meals on busy days, let me use her car to commute to Manchester two to three times a week, and provide emotional support in hard times.

My program at UNH Durham will be much tougher than the IT program that I have been in for the past two years. I will be majoring in Artificial Intelligence, which is more based on mathematics than implementation – even though implementation is still an important component. I can deliver on a dime, and my 4.0 GPA shows that I take school seriously. My friends at school would describe me as a professional student – often not conversing in extraneous conversations with anyone beyond school content. It’s not that I don’t care about other people’s personal lives – it’s just that I take my profession so seriously.

I must begin by taking a lot of preparatory math classes and prerequisites, because the M.S. IT program doesn’t have a math requirement. The computer science degree will be heavily based in computer programming – especially with regards to calculus. This is the hardest thing I have ever attempted, and I’ve failed tasks that are much simpler than this in the past – however I believe that my M.S. IT degree was good preparation for this next journey that I’m about to embark on, and I believe that I’ll be very successful. It’s because I spend 40+ hours a week working on homework, even when there isn’t enough homework to fill up that much time. I’ve read hundreds of books over the past several years, and I’m sure that quota will only increase now that I’m working on a PhD.

This is probably the best time for me to work on a PhD, and while the opportunity cost is high because of how much I could be making with my Master’s of IT, I believe it is the right decision. I want to pursue both teaching and being a scientist in a laboratory setting. I will likely wait until my third or fourth year in this program before I would consider taking on a teaching internship, while that is always a possibility. I want to make sure I’m well grounded in principles first, and that I have enough time to manage my class load. This program will probably take me 4-5 years to complete, and I am aware of at least 3 other students that are considering highly pursuing the same tract that I have embarked on now that I’ve announced it. I’d be happy to accept anyone as a classmate – we’re going to need to stick together and work hard on this task!

--Patrick R. McElhiney

Category: Pages
Hits: 3300

Patrick McElhiney finally broke out and bought a nice lab quality microscope for use for marketing and educational purposes. Below are some slides that Patrick captured with his new microscope. The microscope is capable of magnifying slides up to 2500 times their original size, and has four different magnifying lenses, in addition to a 14 mega-pixel digital camera that can capture stills and videos in high definition. Patrick hopes to be able to use the microscope to investigate the differences between different printing types, and he also conveniently is working on a group project in his Big Data class at UNH Manchester that is about building a highly scalable database to store petabytes worth of microscope slide captures, from a microscope that is much more complex than the one that Patrick owns now. That microscope uses four different bands of laser light, to magnify objects as small as neurons in rat brains to the size of a pencil eraser head. Patrick isn't sure what the magnification level is, because apparently it's some type of "Top Secret" microscope for cutting edge medical research on rat brains, or even human brains in the future - to be able to see the dendrites and axioms as clear as day. Patrick gets exposure to a lot of high tech projects because he attends UNH Manchester - he's currently building out an Amazon Web Services project to house all of the slide scans, which will literally be petabytes of information spread out over multiple data centers. Enjoy Patrick's slides!

Category: Pages
Hits: 3144

Dear Site Visitor,

Thank you for visiting my personal website. As you probably know by now, the initial version of my Autobiography is available for everyone to read and review online through this website. I have been editing the book throughout 2017-2018.

I have returned to a full-time school schedule at the University of New Hampshire. I will still be gathering information and stories to use in my Autobiography during this school semester, and going forward. My hopes are to expand on topics that have been presented, and to improve the content so it is more of a good read.

In this website, you can also see information about my past and present schooling, my professional life as the Company Founder of MCE123, and the various types of jobs and volunteer positions that I have held over the years. I have been expanding the section for Employers to include all relevant information about my professional skills in different categories. Employers should also check the MCE123 website, as it deals with a completely different set of information relating to my work with the company. I have also updated my resume on this website as of 2018.

I have a section that is dedicated to my political life, which will eventually branch off into a separate website. I also have a Photo Galleries section.

I hope you enjoy learning more about who I am, and who I would like to become. I am always looking for more content to add to this website, so I can be more open and informative to my family, friends, and the public about my background and potential future endeavors. If you enjoy going through the website, please send me detailed feedback about how I can improve it!

Thank you for your time,

--Patrick R. McElhiney