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What are you doing?

A feeling common among senior undergraduates (and senior high school students, and junior undergrads, etc) is the your-life’s-about-to-start-what-are-you-going-to-do pressure. The common questions one faces include but are not limited to: What are you doing post-college? Are you getting a job? Where are you going to live? What about grad school? Will you stay in academia? What about high-paying tech/business/etc jobs?

Surprise: That feeling of uncertainty doesn’t always go away after graduation, or even after a year. Probably not even after five, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. I may be more on track than some. I’ve set my sights on a career in science and research, the next step of which will, for me, be grad school. But I’m sure I’m more uncertain than others.

So, from a student who’s been there, here are some thoughts on…

College, Internships, and Figuring Out What the **** You Want To Do With Your Life

You already know that there are a lot of questions to answer.

For example:

If you’re considering a STEM career, like me, then a lot of people will say you have two options — academia or industry. Even before you try to tackle which of these you might like, though, you may need to figure out what specific area you want to enter — if you’re a computer scientist, would you want to develop algorithms? Would you rather work on security applications, or distributed networks, or use your CS knowledge to program laser space robots, or any of thousands of other options?

Some programs of study prepare you for specific careers; others leave you with a remarkably open-ended future.

So… how might you even start figuring out your life?

The most important thing to know

You do not have to do the same thing forever.

That’s important, so I’ll say it again:

You do not have to do the same thing forever.

If you pick a career direction now, you aren’t stuck with it for the next forty years. People change jobs. People change careers. I had a particularly good role model in this regard: my father has owned a sailing school, consulted for small businesses, recorded punk bands, and then there was this thing in Africa… Point is, you can do whatever cool things you want. You don’t have to do the same thing forever.

Granted, knowing that you can do something else later doesn’t necessarily help at all with figuring out what to do now. On to the next section:

The “Figure My Life Out” Toolkit

Your two best resources are

1. yourself
2. other people

By this, I mean that you should (1) try new things as a way of figuring out what kinds of things you like doing, and you should (2) talk to other people about their experiences in doing different kinds of things. Gather information about what makes you happy, what kind of work you find worthwhile, what kind of jobs sound just plain cool, and so on.

Try new things

There are several ways to proceed. Three of my favorites:

1. Classes. The reason I took my first computer science class was because one day, I looked at my laptop and thought to myself, I don’t know how you work at all. I signed up for CS101, vaguely hoping that I’d learn something about the Magical Innards of Computers. I didn’t — instead, I learned some Magical Incantations and Rituals for making little Java applications. I also learned that programming was fun, and that I’d probably enjoy further classes in that area. Now? The graduate program I’m entering has a heavy CS component, and most of the other programs I’d applied to were CS programs.

The point of this story: Take classes in novel areas. Either in person, at school, or via one of the increasing number of free online courses. It’s one of the best ways to explore new subjects. If, after the first couple class sessions, you really hate it? Drop the class. It’s worthwhile to remember that you may love a subject but dislike a professor, or love a professor enough to make any subject taught interesting. Regardless, it’s a nice, easy, safe way to explore new stuff. You never know what you might find.

2. Independent learning. My personal favorite here is reading books on all sorts of cool non-fiction topics. Pick up a book at the library on a topic you know nothing about, read it, see if it interests you. Other options include taking free online courses (see point 1), joining clubs to try out new activities, volunteering for new programs, … lots of potential here. Spend time thinking about what activities you find worthwhile and important — helping people or animals in need? Engineering solutions to problems in the world? Making a lot of money so you can live the life you want?

3. Internships etc. The best time for this, if you’re in school, is those warm summer months between semesters. Summer internships. Summer research programs. If you’re interested in cognitive science or computer science, I have a

Talk to people

This point sounds relatively straightfoward. Okay, have conversations with people. But there are several ways to get the most out of those conversations…

1. Listen to advice. You know all those other people who want to give you advice? Let them. These people may be your grandparents, your professors, other relatives, older students, current professionals … anyone, really. Let them talk. Listen to what they all have to say. You don’t have to take their advice — not a word of it — but now and then, they say useful things. And you won’t hear those useful things unless you’re listening.

2. Use your resources wisely. You probably know a lot of people. These people probably know a lot of people. Some of those people might be working jobs you’re interested in. Some of those people might know people who are looking for people to work for them. Get the gist?

A further couple points:

Tell people what you’re looking for. If they don’t know, they can’t help you or hook you up with opportunities they find.

If you’re in school, your school probably has a Career Development Office or the like. Talk to the people there. Tell them what you’re hoping to find — whether it’s a specific internship, information about a particular field, or just that you’re hopelessly confused and would like their help. They have resources for you. It’s their job to have resources for you.

See if you can set up informational interviews with people in fields you might be interested in, to get the scoop on what it’s like to work that kind of job.

Attend job fairs — a lot of schools host them; does yours? — and even if you’re not looking for any particular job yet, it’s a great opportunity to talk to recruiters about the kinds of jobs out there.

3. Ask a whole bunch of questions. The best thing to remember is that, in general, people really like talking about themselves. Use this to your advantage. Even simple questions like “So, what’s your job like?” and “Can you tell me more about what it’s like to do X?” can lead to worthwhile information.

Then what?

The next step is pretty simple. (Do recall, simple does not necessarily mean easy.)

You’ve learned about your options. You’ve learned about what you like doing. You’ve learned about what you find worthwhile. It’s time to stop evaluating possible directions to go in and actually go in a direction.

Maybe now, you know exactly what you want to do with your life. Great — do that! Or maybe now you’ve concluded that no job will ever make you content. That one’s a bit tougher. Try to find something at least tolerable, or, like some people joke, marry rich? Or maybe you like everything, and the sheer number of options is still overwhelming. Your best option here: find a reasonable job in a reasonable location near people you like. Go in some direction, at least for a while. If you love it, great. If you don’t, move on.

Still have questions? Post a comment below! Maybe I, or someone else, will have helpful advice for you specifically.

And no matter what, remember: You don’t have to do the same thing forever.

Why did you pick cog sci?

When I can tell a ten-second answer is all that’s wanted, I say, “because I took an intro cognitive science class in my first semester of college and loved it.”

Some people realize I must’ve had some reason for signing up for an intro cog sci class in the first place. They tend to be satisfied with an answer like “because I read a book on consciousness before college, and wanted to know more.”

The real answer, the one that’s actually about why, is this:

No one knows yet how or why I’m a self-aware person. And I’d really, really like to find out.

Mysteries and mysteries

A couple years before I ventured across the country to begin my Vassar education, I started reading books about mysteries. Not fiction mystery novels — actual mysteries, in which no one knows whodunnit yet, though a whole lot of people have theories. Things that are hard to think about, or crazy difficult to conceptualize. The nature of space-time. Infinity. Perception. (My favorite my favorite exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco was always the optical illusions.)

First, it was books like Richard Wolfson’s Relativity Demystified, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds, Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio. All the grand mysteries of the universe, its structure, and the math and physics underlying it. I didn’t completely grasp the details of the theories, but it was sure fun to try!

Then I decided to read about people. I honestly don’t remember why I picked up Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness: An Introduction — was I just browsing the generic non-fiction science books section? I remember the library. I remember kneeling on the carpet, pulling the book off one of the lower shelves.

This book opened my eyes.

At first, I was a little disappointed. Why couldn’t Susan tell me how people worked? How I worked? I wanted answers! How am I a person? Why am I a person? Why can I think about myself thinking? Perhaps I’d assumed, up until that point, that scientists had all the hard problems figured out and now were just filling in the details.

My dismay was swiftly and thoroughly overridden by the realization that here was one of the Big Questions in the universe. Still so much left to discover. The twinkling thought: could I help discover it? And utter fascination. I distinctly remember standing on the local community college campus before a class, staring wonderingly at the landscaping, thinking, what is it like to be a tree?

So I read more.

I read what I could find in my local public library system. (I wonder what I would have read and learned had I instead had a proper university library at my fingertips.) I also bought a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach, which intrigued and confused me. I was severely disapponted by Andrea Rock’s The Mind at Night, because I’d naively assumed that I could read one book and then understand why people sleep and how dreaming works.

I read William Calvin’s How Brains Think, which didn’t actually tell me how brains think but did introduce me to some relevant terminology. I learned how complicated memory is and how to pronounce aplesia from Eric Kandel’s memoir In Search Of Memory. Judith Rich Harris’s No Two Alike was part of my introduction to the nature-nurture debates, a lot of twin studies, and just how important the enviroment and an organism’s interactions with it are in determining what the organism is like.

I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Stanislas Dehaene’s The Number Sense, and some others, too. As before, I’m quite sure that I did not fully understand any of the theories presented, not having a background in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, or neuroscience at that point.

Basically, I discovered the mind sciences at an opportune moment, in time to sign up for an introductory cognitive science course my freshman year.

And now?

I still don’t know why or how I’m a self-aware person. No one does. I do, however, have a much better idea of the theories other folks have, the problems being tackled, and some of the methodologies being used in the quest. Maybe, now, I’ll be able to help solve the mystery myself.

Sunset over Masaya Volcano, Nicaragua

I’ve posted a decent number of photos over the years — nearly every photo on this website is one I’ve taken. While one could feasibly wander back through my archives to view them, I decided to spare one the trouble.

I’ve collected a comprehensive list of my photography-themed posts. I have yet to add a complete gallery of all the photos I’ve ever posted, but that’s in the works.

New to your eyes, dear reader, is the special section on the Vassar Palmer Gallery exhibit Through the Student Lens, which featured two of my photos!

View from the room

During my senior year at Vassar, I periodically took photos through my bedroom window of the trees and the courtyard area between all the senior apartments.

The end result? This series, showing the seasons changing throughout the year. Photos are unedited.

September 10, 2010

October 8, 2010

October 15, 2010

October 26, 2011

October 28, 2010

October 28, 2010

November 5, 2010

November 17, 2010

December 15, 2010

January 11, 2011

January 12, 2011

January 18, 2011

January 25, 2011

February 10, 2011

March 11, 2011

March 11, 2011

April 13, 2011

April 29, 2011

April 29, 2011

If I did this kind of series again, I’d make a point of putting the camera in the same place every time, and taking photos at set intervals. I think it still turned out pretty cool.

Don’t ever stop

This one’s a life update post, but it’s also a “here’s some cool science!” post.

A few days ago, I graduated from Vassar College with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science and a correlate in Computer Science. I was decorated with general honors, departmental honors, membership to Psi Chi, and membership to Sigma Xi. My time there was awesome.

What’s next?

No lazy summer!

Well, no lazy summer break for me! I’ve already spent three days in my summer lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where I’ll be working on a number of software development projects. The primary one is a LIDAR-assisted robotic group exploration project, in which we’re going to have a small fleet of robots — a mothership and some workerbots — use 3D LIDAR data to autonomously map and plot paths through an area. This kind of robot fleet could, eventually, be used to explore other planets. One of the big challenges will be dealing with the 3D image data. I’m looking forward to learning more image processing algorithms!

Another project is the redesign of the Greenland Robotic Vehicle, a big autonomous rover that’ll drive across Greenland, collecting a data about snowfall, mapping, and exploring. Did you know there’s ice on that country two miles thick? I may also get to play with a robot that has stereo vision.

You can see some of these robots (and what life in the lab may be like) in this great video about last year’s interns.

So far, I’ve met a bunch of intelligent, friendly folks, started catching up on already-written code, and begun to delve into the platforms, libraries, and algorithms we’ll be using and developing this summer. Our mentors have already proven themselves to be enthusiastic and helpful. Just yesterday, one of them told us,

“You’re engineers at NASA. You want to go where things are, and then go beyond.”

That may end up being our theme for the summer.

A little overwhelming?

There’s going to be so much going on. It’d be easy to get overwhelmed — especially now, jumping in and floundering around in the code, the projects, the people. So much to learn.

But as I sat in the lab today, reading about ROS, going through tutorials, reading about PCL and feature detection in point clouds, digging through last summer’s confusing pile of C# and C++ programs, I realized I wasn’t overwhelmed. And it was because of all the other experiences I’ve had that’ve gotten me to this point.

Confidence. My first URSI summer, flailing through Microsoft Robotics Studio and complicated conceptual theories. Figuring out how to deal with webcams and image data my second URSI summer, reading papers on optical flow and implementing algorithms. Last summer: excavations of an open source flight simulator, the Aeronautics Student Forum, dealing with different work styles and communication styles in my LARSS lab. And more.

I think about all those experiences, and I’m not afraid of this summer. I could almost be overwhelmed — perhaps thinking that everyone else has more of the right kind of experience; I wasn’t trained as a classic engineer — but I know I can succeed. My non-engineering, cognitive science background sets me apart and lets me look at problems a little differently than everyone else. I’m an asset.

I know how to learn. I know how to do research.

I can conquer this summer.

I wrote the following for the Vassar memories portion of the sesquicentennial website. You can find it there, or just read it here:

The Start of Whatever Happens Next

I sit by the glass pane in my room, my bed lofted up to window-seat status. The late afternoon sunshine sends long shadows across the central TA quad, grass sliced by dark grey pavement paths and thin strips of light that make it past the apartments in the west. Most of the trees are bare-limbed yet; I’m still not used to the long winters, keeping the popcorn of apricot flowers at bay until well into April. I can see an evergreen or two from here; I saw turtles in the Casperkill yesterday, and my housemate exclaimed over a robin hopping down one of those paths just this morning.

If spring is only now tip-toeing out into the open, with warmer breezes and longer days, why does summer feel so close?

The past few weeks have been full of endings. My last end-of-season meetings, evaluations, and dinners with the fencing team. Writing the last pages of my senior thesis. Ignoring the emails about preregistration, housing draw, and next year.

I have a plaque propped up at the front of my cube-box bookcase: “Vassar College Women’s Fencing Team, Captain 2010-2011.” Is that really what all this time comes down to? A plaque, a pile of textbooks, a sense of nostalgia now that it’s almost over?

I pulled out a new notebook today. Some people measure their lives in chapters, or by photo albums and video clips. Sometimes, I think I measure mine in journals. Today, it felt wrong to keep on in the old notebook, plastic pink cover and pages three-quarters filled, loose sheets of notes slid in the back and beneath the front cover, a notebook I bought in an office supply store in Sydney, Australia, for one of the classes I took there (and later re-appropriated). It was a college notebook: wide lined pages, a spot at the top for a six-digit date, perforated pages and a cut-out slot on the cover for storing a pen. It was a journal of uncertainty; it held the worries, fears, and dreams of a student far away from the familiar. It held beginnings, endings, reconciliations, the wonder of realizations and the hope that every next step would be just as exciting, thrilling, amazing.

I pulled out a new notebook today, fished it from the big plastic storage bins under my bed, and when I opened it, a silver piece of foil fell out. It had been tucked just inside the front cover, a Dove chocolate wrapper, the kind with little inspirational quotes printed on them. It said, “It’s never too late for a fresh start.”

This, it’s a notebook for the start of whatever happens next.

With summer coming fast, I’m paying more attention than I ever did to all the little things around me that I love about Vassar. The green floor in Walker Bay 5, where I’ve spent more hours than I’ll ever count training with the fencing team. The way a sunset looks across Ballentine field. The sound of Barefoot Monkeys calling “boo-a-woop!” from distant parts of campus, with similar cries echoing in return. Even the weird patterns painted on the ceiling in Main’s front lobby — have you ever looked up at them?

Four years of my life.

Seven semesters and two summers at Vassar. One semester abroad. One summer in Virginia.

People. The adventures we dreamt up. Favorite haunts, favorite classes, clubs and sports, lectures and workshops.

So many moments. All it takes is one minuscule event — a flip of bits, a neuron firing, a butterfly’s wings in South America — to start a change.

Taking Introduction to Cognitive Science with Ken Livingston freshman year. I took it because I’d read a book on consciousness, because when I’d read a book about dreaming I found out that no one really knows what goes in our heads, because I realized there’s still more to learn, and I’m nothing if not fascinated by the unknown. The final paper in that class was to pick a chapter of Paul Thagard’s Hot Thought, in which he presented models of emotional cognition and applies them to just about everything (one phenomenon per chapter), and elaborate on it. I picked the chapter on the emotional coherence of religion. After reading those twenty-two pages, I realized I’d never learned how to bullshit a paper, and thus, that I knew far too little on the subject to even scrabble together a rough draft. I promptly checked out a huge stack of books on cognition and religion from the library. I supplemented these with a whole bunch of pdfs from journal databases online. I remember my roommates being a little confused, or maybe concerned, at the amount of effort I put into that paper.

I remember, mostly, being absolutely certain that I had to keep reading if I wanted to know enough to write a good paper on the emotional coherence of religion.

I declared myself a cog sci major early sophomore year.

Some moments were mundane: Laughing at the “Dead End” sign hung up on the end of Collegeview Age where the road met the cemetery. Taking photos of the magnolias in bloom. Staring up at little flakes of snow, floating down in front of a street light. Chasing after womp-womps and squirrels and deer.

Simple long-lasting jokes. One came out of the very first cog sci program party I attended. I was a freshman; I didn’t know anyone and I was one of maybe two freshman there — everyone else was familiar with the lay of the Kenyon Club Room, its lack (and great need) of a giant moose head hanging over the fireplace, the fact that Gwen Broude always brought cookies and Ken Livingston always brought thick-crust pizza from Uno’s. I was introduced: “Hi, have you met Jackie?” I was re-introduced: “Hi, have you met Jackie?” and re-introduced again, enough times that it became a thing. Every cog sci party thereafter, this particular group of 2010s and 2009s reintroduced me to each other.

Some moments defined the rest of my college career.

Sitting cross-legged in an armchair in the Kenyon Club Room. I was wearing a bright orange skirt. The cog sci faculty had just had a debate on consciousness, and I hadn’t stood up to leave yet. Ken Livingston asking me whether I’d like to be one of his URSI students for the summer.

Exchanging emails with a friend over my first URSI summer: trading book recommendations, discussing relationships and research and brains. Returning to campus: “Would you mind terribly if I kissed you?” Meeting another new friend as a result of Vassar, back home before the start of another semester.

Sophomore year was an awesomely social year, full of exciting people.

Backstage waiting for the far-too-familiar opening music of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. An airplane to Colorado for the Grace Hopper Celebration. The trek between Main and Cushing, the tower room where my friends and I gathered for homework parties.

Sophomore year was the year I didn’t spend Thanksgiving with my family. I’m from across the country; that break is short in comparison to the amount of traveling. A senior on the fencing team invited a couple of us far-from-home friends over for the holiday — he spent time growing up in Australia, and one of his friends was Australian. The other girl was Greek. I was the only American tagging along on the adventure.

Deciding, after that, (with a scant week until the application deadline) that I wanted to go abroad.

Late nights in the IRRL. One Thursday, when my robot competition team’s microcontroller fried and we spent the night frantically googling possible fixes.

Papers and books and highlighters spread out across a dorm room floor, three of us staying up past 2am pounding out the last pages of our ant papers.

Evenings in the Main kitchen, making macaroni and cheese or curry or trays of almond cookies.

A second URSI summer, cut short because the Australian semester starts at the end of July.

Many moments were at Vassar, but not all. One fine spring night in early November, I ate at a Turkish place in Newtown, Sydney with some of my international friends. Australian, Philippine, Japanese, Mexican, Russian. One of them handed me a US penny, saying, here, a little taste of home.

Tuesday morning Coffee and Cakes in Sydney, standing in the grass by a table of orange juice and tea and cookies, chatting with the rest of the Unimates. Knowing that when any of us traveled the world, we would have friends in nearly any country we visited.

A summer in Virginia. Showing my badge every morning to get into NASA Langley, working in an air-conditioned building-inside-a-building. Quadcopters, open source flight simulators, the Parking Lot Exploration Rover, a pirate festival, Wednesday evening volleyball, roller coasters and fireworks.

Back at Vassar, senior year, I was utterly delighted that I had to buy fourteen plus books for my cog sci and computer science classes. The first day of the Things in Context seminar, Gwen Broude announced that everything is context and context is everything, and how it was hard to teach a class on everything, but she’d try. I’ll forever look at the world as a dynamic system, in terms of context and embodiment, in terms of correlated sensorimotor and subjective experience.

Long hours in the Neuroscan Lab, re-dubbed the EGI lab after the equipment got replaced, typing line after line of text for our stimulus set or squeezing in another participant run. Wanting clean data and results out of that EEG study; finally re-running the whole thing nearly two years later.

Some moments were about my life as a cog sci major, but not all.

Swinging an axe at a candy-filled computer hanging from a tree; laughing as all the computer scientists ran to scoop up tootsie rolls and jolly ranchers.

Turning down invitations to dances and parties, hours spent at my laptop or in the OLB computer lab, trying to finish assignments before the weekend’s fencing meets.

Playing frisbee in the parking lot outside Walker. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The morning the bus broke down, 5am and probably negative degrees outside. The van safety course, and the nutritionist. My fencing girls, making up new lyrics to currently popular songs: “We’re on a bus!” “All the sabre ladies…” “Just fence!”

Making history. Singing Queen’s “We Are The Champions” on the way back from Wellesley: the Vassar Women’s Fencing team won our conference for the first time ever. Ice cream socials and picnics on graduation hill.

So many moments. So many memories.

Realizing, again and again, that there’s just enough time to know that there’s never, never enough time.

As I write this, middle of April, glass pane separating me from the sunlight and the squirrels bouncing through the grass, I hold a new notebook in my hands. It’s white and periwinkle-blue, bound by a silver spiral. A photo is printed on the front in grayscale, framed by thick blue lines: a man silhouetted at the end of a wooden pier, staring out across a shining ocean. He can see the horizon, I think. Below the photo are written the words “Build a dream and the dream will build you.”

This, it’s a notebook for the start of whatever happens next.

I loved my time at Vassar. It’ll take a long time for these patterns of neural activity to fade.

Summer plans

My first post-graduation plans have been finalized: I’ll be returning to the fine world of software development and robotics for a summer internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I’ll be working with a diverse bunch of engineers and interns on what I expect will be super exciting, super cool projects.

Thesis!

On Friday, I turned in my undergraduate cognitive science thesis. It’s been a year in the making — I started brainstorming ideas last April, spent all summer reading up on relevant literature, and all of this school year developing my model, programming the simulation, running experiments, and finally, writing about all of that.

It’s a little weird to realize that I don’t have to constantly be thinking about this project any more. I don’t have to be, but ever since handing it in, my thoughts continue to swirl around what further analyses to do on the data I collected, how to fix up the studies I did to get more powerful results, which studies would make sense as the next step…

Here’s the abstract:

A biologically inspired predator-prey study of the effects of emotion and communication on emergent group behavior

Any agent that functions successfully in a constantly changing world must be able to adapt its behavior to its current situation. In biological organisms, emotion is often highlighted as a crucial system for generating adaptive behavior. This paper presents a biologically-inspired predator-prey model to investigate the effectiveness of an emotion-like system in guiding the behavior of artificial agents, implemented in a set of simulated robots. The predator’s behavior was governed by a simple subsumption hierarchy; the prey selected actions based on direct sensory perceptions dynamically integrated with information about past motivational/emotional states. Aspects of the prey’s emotion system were evolved over time. The first study examined the interactions of a single prey with the predator, indicating that having an emotion system can led to more diverse behavioral patterns, but may not lead to optimal action selection strategies. In the second study, groups of prey agents were evolved. These agents began to utilize alarm signaling and displayed fear contagion, with more group members surviving than in groups of emotionless prey. These results point to the pivotal role emotion plays in social scenarios. The model adds to a critical body of research in which important aspects of biological emotion are incorporated into the action selection mechanisms of artificial agents to achieve more adaptive, context-dependent behavior.