Assignment #2: My Education at UW

Thoughts Freshman Year: Autumn Quarter and a 4-Year Plan

Draft a sample 4-Year Plan and highlight 3 courses that you KNOW you want to take wihle at UW. Share the course description as provided by UW catalog and/or department, AND annotate that description with a personal reflection of why you want to be sure to take this particular course before you graduate.

   I've come into the UW not knowing what I wanted to major it. I was utterly confused. There were a million possibilities: Accounting, Chemistry, Biochem, etc...It was much easier to ask me what I didn't want to major in rather than what I wanted to major in. Honors 100 allowed me to devise a plan for one of my possibilities, accounting. Even though I am not sure if I want to pursue this major, having to do this assignment generally helped me realize what classes are available to me if I really was to pursue accounting.

See below for my 4-Year Plan

Assignment #3: Experiential Learning

Pair up with another student in your Honors 100 section and interview each other about your interests or what is important to you, then research an Experiential Learning opportunity in the areas of Research, Service, Leadership, or International Engagement.

Partner: Vincent Chan (linked is what Vincent found for me)Interview

Summary:

     Vincent has a really strong interest in anything related to computers, which usually points to an Experiential Learning opportunity in Research. His declared major right now is computer science and he although he wants to keep his options open, he is pretty passionate about computer science and has already researched into specifics. Vincent wants to research something related to artificial intelligence, such as robots or any human-machine interaction. 

Findings:

     Personally, I think having a really specific interest in a more general field is great, because you already know what you want to do in your chosen field. To find a research opportunity for Vincent, I went to the"Find Research at UW" page and searched for computer science and artificial intelligence.

    The one search result that came up seemed to fit quite well: Scalable, Open Domain Information Extraction from Free Text, coordinated by Mausam. If interested, one should contact mausam@cs.washington.edu The description given was:

"Converting natural language text to a machine understandable knowledge base is a holy-grail of artificial intelligence. UW is one of the frontrunners in the field with large scale information extraction system, Textrunner (www.cs.washington.edu/research/textrunner), which reads text at Web-scale and converts it into snippets of information that fill a domain-independent knowledge-base. The current research project aims at enhancing Textrunner along multiple dimensions, for example, increasing precision and recall of extractions, adding a pronoun resolver into the system, extending expressiveness of the knowledge base, etc. This project is very timely and pushes on a US-wide initiative called Machine Reading that kickstarted last August. The undergraduate’s role will be in implementing  and formally evaluating new technologies, and also in participating in discussions regarding future directions. A successful implementation may be  used in the next version of Textrunner, which is a demo freely available over the Web. The student should be comfortable with Java and should have preferably taken the artificial intelligence course (CSE473). We expect the project to take 10-15 hours of student’s time per week."

    Basically, Vincent would be working on converting natural language to a language that a machine would be able to understand, and he may actually have a change to implement his technology and discuss further uses for what he creates. This seems like it would be a really interesting topic for Vincent; the only issue would be that they prefer the student to have taken the artificial intelligence course CSE473, which he will probably take sometime in his junior or senior year of college; so he may not be able to start this research until he has a little more information about artificial intelligence and Java.

Assignment #4: A New Experience

For this assignment, we were required to go to the RSO page and find a club that matched our interest, then attend the club and write a reflection. The club that I chose was CSA (Chinese Student Association), and I attended the first club meeting near the beginning of the school year.

    The club meeting that I attended was for Chinese Student Association (CSA). I attended their introductory meeting, and the first thing that I noticed when I walked in was that it was in an auditorium. I was definitely amazed at how many people showed up for this meeting, and I was also amazed at the twenty or so officers they had. The meeting was really interesting, because they provided all the information we needed to know while still keeping things lively. CSA promotes Chinese cultural awareness and works to bring people from all backgrounds together to increase cultural understanding. The officers were all on good terms with each other, and really enthusiastic, and even though they were a bit over-enthusiastic, I could still tell that they genuinely enjoyed what they were doing and really wanted us to join. During the meeting, they went through a PowerPoint that summarized all their events during the school year; all of them incorporated cultural awareness while still making sure that the members would have fun. One event was Dumpling Night, and learning how to make a traditional Chinese food was a new cultural experience that definitely sounded like fun. As an incentive, they brought food and we played games (with questions related to the PowerPoint) to see which side of the room would be able to eat first. Even though the “food tactic” is an extremely cliché way of making people come, it was still fun and exciting. There don’t seem to be any more meetings, but there were many events listed during the meeting and they seemed really interesting; I’m definitely compelled to go to some of them. In particular, I was thinking about attending the CSA Dumpling Night, Lunar New Year Show, and the CSA Annual Barbeque, a few of their bigger events. I think that it would be a great chance to meet new people and find new friends that share the same common interest of promoting Chinese cultural awareness.

    I really want to be extremely involved with only a couple of RSO’s instead of only being slightly involved in many. Now that I’ve found CSA, a cultural club, I’d like to find a club that is just for fun and a club that relates somewhat to my major (which is still undecided). I was thinking about joining either a business club or a pre-med club (my two main interests), and for fun, I’d like to join Capture the Flag or the Wushu club.

Assignment #5: Portfolio Statement

As this quarter comes to a close, I reflect about how just one quarter at UW has changed me and how I hope I will change in future quarters and years to come.

The Start of a New Chapter in My Life

    There are definitely two aspects of my life at UW: a social aspect and an educational aspect. I know that my standards for both of these have changed immensely in a span of 10 weeks. When I first heard that there were only 10 weeks until I would have a new schedule, I was convinced that it would pass by sluggishly. However, we’re now nearing the beginning of finals, and I can’t believe that 10 weeks could pass so quickly.

    Truthfully, the first thing that ran through my head when I knew I was headed to UW, “I’m going to have a longer summer break now”. In the beginning of September, I began to think about the goals and expectations that I was going to set for myself at UW, and in Honors. In the beginning, my goal was to get a 3.8 or above, a goal that I knew was really high, but I wanted to try because rather than being someone who is always gazing at the stars, I wanted to shoot for the stars. Because I was so unfamiliar with Honors, I didn’t really have many expectations for it, other than hoping to familiarize myself to the program. But my biggest goal was to just find out what I wanted to major in, because I was extremely unsure of what I wanted to do in the future. Nothing really seemed to interest me enough for me to want to pursue it as a lifetime career.

    The first week of college was a bit more stressful than I’d have liked it to be. It was actually really embarrassing to have all the heads turn towards you as you walk in late, early morning bus rides turned stressful when I fell asleep and almost missed my stop, and almost being run over by a bus was an experience I would never forget. I’m really that I found friends to confide in and trust right away, even if some of them were acquaintances from before, I still felt like I found a nice social niche that I was comfortable with. That was my goal socially, and now I’ve realized that I want to expand out of my comfort range in the next few quarters and join become involved in some clubs (I’ve been to a few meetings for different clubs but none had regular meetings that particularly interested me). I think my biggest challenge was just adjusting to the surrounding, since Seattle is definitely more city-like than Lynnwood, even though they’re both in Washington.

    Right now, I’m so caught up in my schoolwork and other obligations that I haven’t had time to regularly attend any club meetings or extra-curricular activities. Next quarter, I definitely want to join a club, like maybe photography or wushu. In Honors 100, I learned about experiential learning opportunities such as internships, research, and study abroad, and I definitely want to pursue them. I think study abroad sounds the most interesting, and I would like to go to someplace in Europe or Asia simply because I love traveling and learning about new places in new environments.

    My goal of a 3.8 hasn’t really changed, even though I don’t think I’ll reach it. I know college is a lot harder, but I can’t fully bring myself to assure myself that as long as I’ve tried my hardest, then it’s okay to not get a good grade. When the first midterms rolled in, I was a lot more stressed than I thought I would be. My chemistry midterm was definitely lower than I wanted it to be, and even though it was slightly above the average grade, I wasn’t satisfied with it because a lot of the mistakes I made were stupid and could’ve been easily avoided. My English essay grade wasn’t that bad either, but I was able to come to terms with it because I agreed with all the comments that my professor gave. I think the most unexpected thing for me was how three or even two tests would be used to determine the majority of your grade in the class. It is so easy to make just a small mistake that you didn’t mean to, and that mistake could cost you one, five, or even ten points.

    I still don’t know what to major in, but Honors 100 has given me an opportunity to see what kinds of majors there are, and what classes I need to take if I were to pursue one of my potential majors, accounting. It can get really frustrating because my friends all seem to know what they want to major it, but after talking with my advisor, I was assured that the majority of them were most likely going to change their mind and that I still had a lot of time to decide, so I shouldn’t worry too much and just take classes until I found something that I enjoyed.