Winter Update, Grad School News

Hello! Here’s just a quick update from me. The first 6 months of my graduate school experience has just flown by. I’m now in my second week of winter quarter. Phew!

First, I want to just make an observation about my experience so far before I get into the news segment of this post. I have had moments of sheer anxiety and insecurity, but those seem to be balanced out with moments of happy triumph. An email I received recently really sums up why there is this oscillation of confidence. The contents of the email were along the lines of “You have a really awesome idea, I’m impressed with you. Why aren’t you talking more in class? You should sit in the front row.” And this is what grad school is all about: small moments of celebration followed by many moments of pushing you to the next level. I’m learning to treasure my little celebrations and embrace all the criticism because it’s going to make me a much stronger person in the long run.

Talking more in class discussion? I’ll save that subject for a different blog post.

Onto the news!

My team submitted a project to the iConference Social Media Expo competition and made it to the final round. We will be flying to Berlin the first week of March to present our work. My favorite part of the project was editing together the video for it. You can see the video and read our abstract on my portfolio page.

I also presented my poster at ASSETS 2013 in October for work I did on the Clothing Tagging Systems for the Visually Impaired. While I probably won’t be doing further work on this project, I got a lot of valuable feedback. The experience I gained from this project has influenced much of the work I am currently doing and will be doing in the future.

I have a couple more projects in the works that I’m excited to share with everyone when they are a little further along. Stay tuned!