Agent Plus Environment

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.

You deserve a big hug

One of my fencing coaches told me today, “You’re one of the people on the fencing team who deserves a big hug at the end of the season for your hard work.”

I appreciated this comment. I appreciated it far more than I expected. What I appreciated was not the implicit compliment (nice as that is), but that someone had noticed the time, effort, and thought I put into the team and into improving my own fencing.

Back to ambition

If you take a look at my recent rambling on ambition, you’ll find I think it’s up to you to achieve what you want to achieve. You’re the only person you’ll have to blame if you’re not satisfied with how you’ve lived your life, be it a sport that you’d like to excel at, a dream job you want to have, a novel you plan to write. The only person who can get you the places you want to go is you.

I call this drive and determination to do the work needed to do the things I want to do ambition. A friend of mine, though, noted that “ambition” often has negative connotations. It’s associated with evil overlords and corporate weasels. And “work,” that’s associated with external imposition. It’s something to be avoided. This comment made me think: Why do I approach work (and ambition) differently?

Fencing coaches give good advice

The most prominent influencing factor that came to mind was my first fencing coach, George Platt. He was a cheerful, positive man, and he explained the difference between achieving success and achieving excellence to all his fencers.

Success, he said, is how good you are in relation to the rest of the world. Success is job promotions and high salaries and winning medals in competitions. Excellence is how good you are in relation to how good you individually can be. Achieving excellence is being the best you can be, regardless of how good anyone else is. And that should be your goal: being the best you can be. Doing what you enjoy and putting effort into the things that are important to you.

Most of us, we’ll never be The Best at anything. The hard part is not letting failure to achieve success dissuade us from continuing to pursue excellence. It’s easy to be discouraged. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I work, but no one else does and no one appreciates it, so I’m going to stop.” It’s easy to lose motivation. So in a world increasingly full of lazy slackers, we need to acknowledge the people who do work hard, no matter what results they garner. That acknowledgment may be exactly what they need to keep going.