A few weeks ago, while I was volunteering with the Trenton Youth Orchestra, a student asked me, “Do you think you have a lot of discipline?” I honestly didn’t know how to respond. Discipline hasn’t been something I’ve spent time thinking about as a college student. While the concept of discipline had been hammered into my brain by soccer coaches and band directors before college, I found myself thinking about what discipline really means here.
Continue reading The Difference is Discipline
In a world where instant responses to messages are possible, it can be especially frustrating when, after several days, you’re still waiting for a response on a time-sensitive issue. Many of us have experienced this before: asking an adviser a question, checking with a teammate if they’ve completed their tasks, and so on. Yet even with conventional wisdom on how to receive a response (crafting a compelling subject line, personalizing a message, or keeping an email short and sweet), responses can be elusive.
The truth is, the people we work with as students, researchers, or employees often have busy schedules. They may have several responsibilities vying for their attention, and sometimes an email just falls lower on their list of priorities. We want to resolve our questions and continue making progress as quickly as possible, yet help does not always come that quickly. In this article, I share key tips I’ve learned through discussions with my managers, colleagues, and advisers over the course of my time as a student and working in industry.
Continue reading The Art of Chasing: Securing a Response to Your Emails
It felt a little odd to begin an email with, “I wrote about your lab in my application to Princeton!” but it was the truth. Since high school, I had been fascinated by memory and its profound effects on shaping our lives, which motivated me to pursue a degree in neuroscience. Professor Kenneth Norman’s work in the Princeton Computational Memory Lab captured my attention while I was exploring Princeton’s resources for my application essays. I wrote about how I wanted to be a part of the lab and study human memory, specifically focusing on how the brain and mind can overcome the emotional consequences of trauma-based memories. After arriving at Princeton, I had been eagerly awaiting the right time to reach out to Professor Norman about getting involved in his research.
Continue reading Exploring Memory: My First-Year Research Experience
When I first walked into the lab this summer, I thought research was all about running experiments and gathering data. What I didn’t expect was how much the people around me—the mentorship and the shared triumphs and failures—would shape so much of my learning and how I view scientific research.
Starting a research position at a bioengineering lab over the summer was really intimidating for me, especially as an undergraduate. At the start, I felt like the most inexperienced person in a room full of graduate students, postdocs, and faculty who seem to have it all figured out. Although I’ve learned or at least seen a lot of the quantitative and qualitative components in my Chemical and Biological Engineering course, I did not have much hands-on experience and critical thinking that comes with actually doing experiments. That’s when I realized how big of a role a mentor plays.
Continue reading Mentorship Matters: A Summer of Research and Growth
Princeton moves fast. The semester is short, the classes are dense, and before you know it, you’re taking midterms and turning in papers for your writing sem. At least, that was my experience as a first year. Even now as a sophomore, it can feel hard trying to keep up with the pace of the orange bubble. Balancing the demands of coursework alongside the demands of work for research teams and professional clubs can limit how productive I feel at any given moment. Those moments, when I feel I’ve done all the readings I can do and written everything I can think about, are so challenging because it feels like I’ve hit an academic wall. That’s when I find ways to shake things up with a study break. For me, that looks like taking a walk. I know it sounds cliche, but taking a walk can be one of the best solutions because it’s so simple.
Continue reading My Go To Study Break
Following the seasonal series theme of “Niche vs. Expansive Research Topics”, I interviewed Dr. Bjarke Frost Nielsen on his journey going from a Physics PhD to working in our EEB department and all of the different topics he’s worked on along the way.
Dr. Nielsen shares, “In general, I have a very broad notion of what physics is. I don’t think for something to qualify as physics it has to, you know, involve Newton’s 2nd Law, be describable in terms of the Schrödinger Equation, or something like that. I think that physics is essentially the science that tries to mathematically tackle the aspects of our physical world that can be attacked mathematically. That’s more or less what physics is, right? It’s choosing the areas where you think that a mathematical description can really capture the problem. … It’s a very broad science in that way.”
Read on to learn more about Dr. Nielsen’s reflections on his research background in Physics and current work in EEB.
Continue reading Seasonal Series: Interview with Bjarke Nielsen, EEB/HMEIOften when I mention the subject of reading for pleasure’s sake in conversations with other Princeton students, I hear the same story repeated with a twinge of sadness and a sense of resignation to the seemingly-inevitable. Most of us seem to have begun our respective childhoods as avid readers who could barely be seen apart from a book. We enjoyed all sorts of reading, and it was not a tiring task but an exciting opportunity. Over the course of many grueling years of schooling filled with assigned readings and the like, this voracious appetite for literature seems to have been largely snuffed out. If you, like me and many others, have drifted away from the pleasurable pastime of reading for fun and wish that you could regain a bit of that excitement which marked your early years, this article will give a few suggestions for how and why you might go about effecting this turnaround.
A few books on my shelf in my dorm— not for class.
Continue reading Reading for Fun: How and WhyLast semester, I interviewed Albert Lee ‘24 to get a glimpse of what conducting qualitative research for sociology Junior Papers can look like at Princeton. (If you’re interested in reading that piece, click here!). Discussing qualitative research with Albert was exciting because his words of advice were quite applicable to the qualitative Computer Science research I was conducting in COS 436: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
An example user prompt and ChatGPT response.
Prior to taking COS 436, I had little idea of what qualitative research looked like in Computer Science, particularly because many of the CS courses I had taken were quantitative, involving systems, mathematical models, or theory. Taking the course opened my eyes to a whole side of research: interview-based qualitative research. For my semester-long research project, my team and I aimed to dive deeper into educators’ opinions on the use of ChatGPT in CS education.
Continue reading Tips for Recruiting Interviewees: My Qualitative Research on ChatGPT Use in CS EducationAs I enter my sixth! semester at Princeton, I find myself still asking the age-old question: where should I go and work today? The challenge with finding the right study space is that they’re frequently mood and assignment-specific.
View of the Forbes backyard, taken by author.
PCUR alumna Nanako Shirai’s 2018 post on finding study spaces on campus is an incredible resource to help you identify the best study space based on your study needs. In this post, I’ll highlight some additional study spaces you could explore this spring. Instead of going by the type of assignment you’re working on, I’ll share four new suggestions on study spaces based on the kind of study environment you prefer. This might help you choose study spaces at which you could complete multiple items on your to-do list.
Continue reading Need a New Place to Study? 4 Niche Study Locations for all Princeton Students!
From left to right: Three control devices (a special keyset, a standard keyboard, and a mouse). Photo credits: The Doug Engelbart Institute.
This semester, I’m taking COS 436: Human-Computer Interaction, taught by Professor Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Professor Parastoo Abtahi. The course explores foundational theories and current research in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), focusing on interactive and social computing across diverse domains like artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), accessibility, information visualization, and human-robot interaction.
As the semester comes to a close, I reflect on how the readings shaped my understanding of HCI and technology more broadly. I found that the readings move beyond just the HCI classroom, offering profound insights on how technology shapes our lives and the importance of design considerations in emerging technologies. Given their value for even those who have no background in computer science, here are three readings I found particularly exciting.
Continue reading HCI is for Everyone: A Glimpse into Princeton’s Human-Computer Interaction Reading List
