Tag: Baltimore (Page 1 of 2)

On Getting Into Grad School, Part 3

April 13, 2013 / kateringland / 0 Comments

Have you read Part 2 yet?

October 2012: More Traveling Fun

Amidst getting through my senior year classes (which were amazingly more difficult than my previous courses), I traveled some more in the fall. At the beginning of October I went to the Grace Hopper 2012 Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. I had been given a scholarship to attend, all expenses paid. It was great because I was traveling with some of my friends from the west coast. We all stayed in the same hotel and I got to show them a little bit of Baltimore (like the train from the airport to downtown).

At Grace Hopper, I was sure to visit the booths of some of the schools I was planning on applying to. It was nice to connect up with people I had made connections with the previous year and with those I had made connections with over the summer.

Later in October, I attended ASSETS 2012 in Boulder, CO. This conference was a lot smaller than anything else I had been to, but it was definitely worth the trip. Here again, I connected up with people from the summer and learned a lot about the assistive tech scene. It was sort of an affirmation that this was the field that I wanted to go into and was proof that it was a viable field to go into. I think one of the best parts was going to dinner with Amy and Michele (that I worked with over the summer) and getting all sorts of advice on how to proceed with my grad school application process. It was a lot more information in one evening than I had ever gotten from anyone at my home institution. I am glad to have made these connections and definitely don’t want to ever turn up the opportunity in the future to make more connections like these.

November 2012: Wrapping Up the Semester and the Applications

By the time I came home from ASSETS I was ready to finish up my applications and get everything done. I had a much stronger idea of what to write for my personal statements and a stronger overall story for the application package. I spent the rest of November writing all the different personal statements and starting to turn in my applications. For the most part, I was able to get all of my applications done by the first of December. This gave me a little breathing room before finals. While the majority of the applications were due December 15^th, I didn’t want to be trying to turn them all in last minute.

It was at the beginning of November that my first paper (I was second author) got presented at a conference. The conference was in Taiwan, so I didn’t have the funds to go, but it was still exciting to have a paper published.

December 2012: This is the End?

I got all my applications done before finals and wrapped up the semester completely exhausted. And broke. Did I mention how much money this whole process ended up costing? I’m a little scared to actually tally up the total, so I won’t. But it was a lot. It was probably in the neighborhood of $1000 after application fees, GRE tests, and transcript requests.

Then the worst part of the entire process began. The waiting.

Knowing that my entire future was in the balance and that the outcome of these applications would determine where I would be living and what I would be doing in less than a year was completely nerve-wracking. And it wasn’t just my life I was messing with- it was also my husband’s.

January 2013: Dealing with Rejection

Luckily, schools were on the ball and started culling their applications by mid-January. I got a couple of rejections right away. While this was a bit discouraging, I had mentally prepared myself for such occurrences. And a rejection was much better than not knowing at all.

But I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for myself or worry too much because I was also keeping myself busy with school and MORE travel! I was prepping at this point to head to the Tapia Conference in Washington, DC. I was to present a poster on work I had done in the fall for my professor.

Right before I left for the conference I found out that I had a phone interview with UC Irvine the Monday after I got back. While I was very nervous about this, I was happy I had made it past the culling phase with at least one school!

I also got invited to interview with Facebook at the Tapia Conference and invited to a Google workshop called Google.GetAJob(). I felt like I would have a lot of hard decisions to make in the next couple of months about our future.

February 2013: It All Starts Coming Together

The first week in February is when I attended the Tapia Conference. While I was there I spent a day visiting my friends at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I talked to them about my grad school applications and interviews. It was really great to catch up and also know that what I was going through was completely normal. The conference itself was also really great. I got to meet people from all over and network with the research labs. I did a poster presentation, which I had only done once before. I got a lot of really great feedback and most of it was positive, too.

During the conference, immediately after my Facebook interview, I got an email saying that I had been accepted to present my poster at the Student Research Competition at CHI 2013 in Paris. If I had had any thoughts of just skipping graduate school and going to industry, they instantly vanished. I knew I wanted to do well at CHI and continue doing research that I enjoyed so much.

After I came home from the Tapia Conference, I had my interview with UC Irvine. It was very informal and a really positive experience. I was able to tell them I had gotten accepted to CHI, which really helped my own confidence.

I also found out that I was invited to an interview on campus at University of Colorado, Boulder set for the 14^th of February. So, off I went on another trip after having just come back from Washington DC.

The night before I left for Boulder, I found out that I had gotten into UC Irvine. I was over the moon. It also made me feel much more comfortable while traveling to Boulder. There I met with students and faculty on the campus. I really loved the town, at least until I got snowed in and ended up staying an extra day. I’m not sure I could live in a place where there’s that much snow. It was still a great learning experience and I got a good idea of what I wanted to find out about Irvine when I visited them in March.

On Getting Into Grad School, Part 1

March 30, 2013 / kateringland / 0 Comments

This blog is probably one that would have been better written in the moment rather than as a retrospective, but as you will see from the timeline I was too overwhelmed with everything else going on to think about writing a blog.

When I was looking to apply to grad school I scoured the internet for information from other grad students and professors looking for anything that would give me the best possible chance at a) knowing if this grad school thing was what I wanted to do and b) giving me the best possible chance of getting into the grad school that was going to be best for me. Now that I’m on the other side of the application process and I’m feeling great about the outcome, I thought I would attempt to share my experience for the next generation of applicants looking for more information.

DISCLAIMER: This is a completely personal experience and should in no way be treated as a how-to guide. Everyone is going to be different, coming from a variety of backgrounds and going into a multitude of different fields of study. Please don’t read this as the perfect way to get into the grad school of your choice; I’m sure there are much easier ways of doing it.

I think the best way to do this is write this out as a timeline of events, with links and info about each of the events. If this gets to be too long, I’ll break this into multiple parts and if something needs more attention than everything else, I’ll break that into its own blog article.

October 2011: Grace Hopper 2011

I went to Grace Hopper in Portland, OR as a student volunteer. It was the first time I got a real good look at what someone could really do with a computer science background. I met a lot of students who were in grad school working towards their PhD. I heard about some cool research being done that I learned was in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Up until this point, I thought a computer science degree was good for getting a job at a software company writing code. The seed of the idea of grad school is planted.

January 2012: Industry Job Interviews

Between Grace Hopper and early 2012, I subjected myself to several really uncomfortable industry interviews. Let’s just say coding on the fly, in a high pressure situation and recalling complex algorithms and data structure optimization is *not* my strongest skill. It’s at this point I really start to question what I am doing and why I am trying to push myself into something that clearly isn’t working out.

February 2012: DREU Internship Application

At the very last minute, I decided to apply to the CRA-W’s DREU internship. It’s also around this time that I started working with a professor at my campus on his smart grid research. He had asked for volunteers, so I decided that it was worth the experience.

It was also around this time I decided that I wanted to pursue a career more in the area of HCI. I was taking the elective “Intro to HCI” offered by my school (which turns out was that great of an intro) and thought my interdisciplinary studies in Psychology and Computer Science were a good fit for this area. I applied for a scholarship to attend CHI 2012 in Austin, TX through the ACM-W.

March 2012: DREU Acceptance and Matching Results

At the beginning of March I received an email saying that I had been accepted to the DREU program for the summer. I was really excited and very worried at the same time. I hadn’t done any extensive traveling and never really on my own. They said they would email me soon with my matched mentor and the location I would be traveling to for the summer. I looked at all the past mentors and their universities. Where would I be living that summer? Who would I have to work with? The only things I had heard from friends that had completed REUs was how awful it was. The mentors just give you some project and are too busy to actually mentor you. The projects aren’t of much consequence or the results end up being something you can’t get a publishable paper out of… I started wondering if I had done the right thing.

I was up all night worrying I would be shipped off to some strange place I couldn’t survive and have a mentor I wouldn’t be able to work with. However, I was not in agony long. It was at school the next day when I got my match-up. The rest, as they say, is history. You can read plenty about my DREU internship on my blog space. Dr. Amy Hurst was the best mentor a person could ask for. She was exactly what I needed at a time when I didn’t even know what I needed or what I was doing with my life.

April 2012: CHI 2012 in Austin, TX

My first real research conference was CHI. Talk about amazingly overwhelming. It’s a lot of people. And I had never been to Texas before. And it was my first time on a plane in years. I really enjoyed it, nonetheless. I think my overall impression was excitement that so many people from so many different places were all passionate about the same thing. There were more computer-oriented people and there were more psychology-oriented people, but they all meshed together to make something pretty exhilarating.

People ask me what my favorite talk was and I don’t even remember. I think if I went back to the program notes and see what I went to, I would probably recall. I have learned a lot since I was there though. How to go to conferences and pick what talks you want to see is an important skill.

CHI is also where I met Dr. Amy Hurst for the first time and some of her students. All in all, it was a good first experience into a world I was soon to submerge myself in.

The saga continues next time in PART 2…

Fall Week 6

October 1, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

This past week has been EXHAUSTING. It was a whirlwind of exams and getting everything finished up for Grace Hopper.

GREs were on Monday. I took about 3 hours and I’m happy with my scores. They aren’t official for another week or so, but I got an estimate right after the test was over. I’m glad I have one less thing to worry about when it comes to grad school applications.

Tuesday I had my Web Data Management midterm and Thursday was Algorithms. PHEW! Both went well, I think. We also gave the demo for our first team project in Web Data Management. This was the first time I really had to do a demo for an instructor like this. I had one demo for Systems in the spring, but it definitely wasn’t anything like this. Now I know what to expect for next time- the prof actually asking us why we chose to do things certain ways, etc.

After exams finished, I was able to focus back on grad school stuff. I’m working on getting my three essays written for the NSF grant, which is due Nov 13th. I know that the deadline is going to come at me way too fast, so I want to get rough drafts written for everything. I have a personal statement draft for grad school applications done, so I’m hoping to use at least some of that for NSF. I’ve also got a draft of my previous research done. All that’s left is the research proposal. I have an idea for it, but I have to do some more background research first to make sure it’s viable. I hope so because it will be pretty good, and go fairly painlessly (I hope) once I have the research bit done.

My CREU research is also experiencing some forward momentum, as I’m starting the process of collecting wattage data. I’m hoping after I get back from Grace Hopper to have some more done!

Off to Baltimore!!

Fall Week 5

September 24, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

I have yet to have a blog post this semester get published on time. I am endeavoring to correct this. Perhaps this is the week I get lucky! This week I had to make some tough decisions and figure out what was going to get cut from my schedule because I am just too busy. Between working (research), school work, home life (some of my home life is feeling sorely neglected at the moment), traveling, and getting ready for grad applications I have zero time. It’s getting me sick and I’m super exhausted. So, something has to give.

I decided to drop the Game Design class, even though it is by far my favorite elective. I am still going to attend the lectures, but I simply don’t have time for all the homework. I was spending ten times more of my outside class time working on projects for that class than all my other classes put together. Not a good balance.

This week started off the first round of exams. This coming week I have GREs on Monday, Web Data Management on Tuesday, and Algorithms on Thursday. Luckily, then I’m off to Baltimore for Grace Hopper! I have finished downloading the conference app on both my phone and tablet. I’m starting to figure out exactly what I need to pack. I’m super excited!!

Since dropping the extra class, I’ve actually managed to get some things accomplished. I’ve finished fixing up my DREU section of the website, so that I can get my last paycheck (which I could really use right now). That was a huge weight on me. Now I have to build a new section for my CREU work, which I’ve been putting off. I think I will actually have enough time this weekend to get that done too. I’ve also gotten a nice chunk of research work for CREU done as well. I’ll hopefully get around to updating my website, so I can start sharing snippets of that.

I also attended the club orientation on campus so that our ACM-W Chapter can be official. I got some good ideas for things I would like to do with the group, so I need to start organizing meetings for that. I still have to work on the website, but I think some of this will have to wait until after Grace Hopper, unfortunately. There is just not enough time in the day for everything!

Week 9

August 6, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

I can’t believe the summer is almost over! I guess it’s a good sign that I wish I were in grad school now so that I could keep going with my project. The RFID Reader kit arrived, so I was able to put it together and actually get it to scan RFID tags. The kit was a shield that just plugged into the top of the arduino. I used the adafruit tutorial to complete the reader and upload the software required for reading the tags.

Reader Kit Unpacked

Breakaway Headers

Soldering the Headers

Soldering Set Up

All Soldered

Reader Assembled

Antenna with RFID Tag

And it works!

This week I also found out that I have been selected to present at the Summer Undergraduate Research Festival on campus next Wednesday. This means I will be giving a 8 minute talk about the project I have been working on this summer. So, I started working on my talk and a video that I will play during the presentation.

Week 8

July 30, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

This week I finished up putting tags into the clothes. I also did a lot of writing this week. I submitted two poster abstracts- one to the campus Research Festival and one to Grace Hopper. I also started a draft of the final paper for this project I have been working on all summer. Luckily, actually quite enjoy the writing process. I’ll be finding out this coming week if my poster abstracts were accepted. Next up: making a poster!

On Thursday, I went to the ADA Celebration on campus. We put some of our projects on display, including the clothe I have tagged. It was really great meeting people and talking a bit about the work we have been doing. We also heard speeches from Dr. Hrabowski and Governor O’Malley.

UMBC HCC Group at the ADA Celebration July 26, 2012

Me at the ADA Celebration

This coming week I’ll be working more on my paper and designing my poster. I hope the RFID reader parts come in, so that I can build the last system for the project. I’ll also be playing around with an NFC enabled tablet to see if I can get it to read the tags we have in the lab!

Week 4

July 2, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

I cannot believe how quickly this internship is going by! The first month is already over! June ended with a severe thunderstorm that left my apartment building without power from 11pm to noon the next day. The weather certainly is a lot bigger here than in the Pacific Northwest.

Last week, I endeavored to play with my Arduino Uno some more. I followed through the tutorials first. This mostly consisted of hooking up LEDs and getting them to do different things (blink and so forth). It doesn’t sound very exciting, but trust me, it is. Here are some pictures from the tutorials:

This was with one LED hooked up.

These LEDs were flashing at different rates thanks to the program I wrote.

The culmination of the tutorials was to have the LED be controlled by a push button.

After I was feeling fairly confident about working with the tutorial, I moved on to the LCD Screen Kit, kindly provided by Amy. I was able to get it all soldered together. And I had it working with the program at first, but then something went wrong and I’m still working on getting it fixed. It’s taking the input from the computer and garbling it, as you will see in the pictures.

All the parts to be soldered together in the LCD Screen Kit.

Soldered back of the LCD Screen Kit.

LCD Screen Back

LCD Screen Kit Front

LCD Message Garbled

There is a bit more work to do figuring out how to ungarble the message. This week I’ll be turning my attention to RFID and NFC scanners and tags.

Week 3

June 25, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

I spent a lot of this week playing with my arduino kit and researching the things we might use with it. I began compiling lists of shields that will attach to the arduino to add functioning. I also looked up tutorials for putting together an LCD kit from Sparkfun.

In my researching, I found a pretty cool blog: Fashioning Tech. It’s fun to go through the articles and see what interesting other people around the world have been doing with fashion and tech. Some of the projects are really quite beautiful. For instance, this article about lace that reads poetry is fascinating.

I think the highlight of the week was learning how to solder from Amy. I’m going to be using it to put circuits and wiring together, but it’s one of those things that is just good to know for life. (My dad is very excited that I can now help him with home repairs.)

My very first soldered wire.

This coming week, Michele will be back from her conferences in the UK and we will be sitting down on Monday to narrow my project down for the summer. I’m really looking forward to hearing about everything she learned at the conferences!

Week 2

June 18, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

I can’t believe another week has already gone by! I guess that’s what happens when you keep yourself busy. Monday we had our first “Fashion Project” meeting. We discussed what each of us is working on and plans for the future. I am working on this project with Michele, the PhD student, Amy, my advisor, and Jeffrey, another undergraduate.

My main task this week was to study up on the arduino and when the kit arrived to start playing with it. Below are some pictures of the unveiling of my arduino kit when it arrived.

Arduino Kit

So many pieces.

Packaging of Arduino "We Love Open Source"

I love the packaging that says “We Love Open Source”.

It’s so little!

Tuesday was an all-hands meeting. It was nice to be able to meet everyone else in the lab and see what projects they are working on. It’s also a nice place to get help and coordinate on skills.

Wednesday I volunteered at the NCIL Conference in Washington, D.C. at the Grand Hyatt. I was there to help assist in the e-voting that was taking place for NCIL’s board. The e-voting system was being run by a group from Clemson and is meant to be accessible to everyone. There is an article about it on Clemson’s website, if you’re interested in learning more about it.

This coming week I plan on taking the plunge and getting my arduino to run with my laptop. I have all the software installed, I just need to load the sketches and go. Hopefully, I’ll have some success to report on that front next week.

Week 1

June 12, 2012 / kateringland / 0 Comments

It’s amazing to me how quickly a week can go by! I have settled in to my living arrangements and even ventured forth a bit over the weekend to check out a local yarn shop. The weather is proving the most difficult thing to get used to, since I’m from Vancouver, WA- it’s 20+ degrees warmer here and much more humid.

This past week, I narrowed down my project, so I have an idea of what I will be working on now. I’ve decided to try my hand at learning the hardware aspects of Arduino, even though my previous electronics experience is limited. The project I’ll be working on is Making Fashion Accessible. You can read more about it on Michele’s website. She’s the PhD student that I will be working closely with, as the overall project is hers. I really liked the idea of working on a project in accessibility. My role will be working on the scanners or smart tags that could be implemented in clothing to make their information ‘readable’ by a smart phone.

This week my goal is to learn as much as I can about Arduino and fashion and technology. Michele is going to a conference on Wearable Computing next week, so when she gets back, the real work on the project can start. I have until then to learn about electronics and wearable hardware.

Even though it’s only been one week, I can already safely say that I am really glad I have had the opportunity to do this this summer. I have learned a lot about grad school in the last week and I am more certain than ever that this is what I would like to do next year. I am super excited to be working with such meaningful research!

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