My Brief Experience

I was fortunate enough to be funded by Dr. Julien Langou during my summer proceeding entering graduate school. This relief from teaching was especially helpful for my transition into post-graduate education, and I was given the opportunity to explore a number of topics that I knew nothing about.

For the first time, I found myself working on an object-oriented task in a programming language that was strongly typed. Most of my time was spent learning C++ and starting to translate Fortran code into templates.

I learned about version control and management of software repositories through GitHub. I also spent the number of hours learning about various algorithms in numerical linear algebra (I took two classes on the topic in my first year).

However, despite the time I spent, I did not generate any results that I can call meaningful or useful. In a sense, I was spread too broadly to make significant progress on anyone specific task. This was a great entry into research and gave me a lot of time to learn, and I’m forever grateful to Dr. Langou for giving me the opportunity to roam a little bit intellectually.

My formal education in computer science began on this project, and my familiarity with object-oriented was given the chance to develop after my first foray during my Probably Art project.