Since being at college I have gotten sick more than one time. At first I was unsure of where to go to the doctor. After doing some research I found that I could just go to the student health center. Making an appointment was easy. All that I had to do was go online and find a time that was free for me to go in and then schedule the appointment. Id was easy to do and there were many appointments available so I was able to get in 3 days later. When I got there all I had to do was swipe my BuckID and follow the instruction kiosk. It told me where to go next and what I needed to do. After that I had my appointment and when I left I was told that if I didn’t get better I was able to message my doctor in My BuckMD and go from there. My sickness didn’t go away and being able to message my doctor was helpful and really easy. Being able to connect to your doctors so easily is very easy and helps recovery. Getting prescriptions there is very easy too. On the first floor of the student health center is very helpful and makes getting prescriptions very easy. In that area there are also over the counter medicines being sold. This is a good idea because with some sicknesses you might only be able to treat the symptoms with over the counter medicines. The student health center is also located in the center of campus right next to the oval. This makes it easily accessible to all students and nobody has to go across campus to get there. There are also multiple appointment windows open every 2o minutes, making getting an appointment easy and flexible. I think that to improve this service there could be more instructions on the floor for the first time you go. I was unsure of what to do when I got there and I ended up going to the wrong place and I was late for my appointment. For the subsequent appointments I had the process of signing in was easy and efficient but the first time should have more guidance. All of the receptionist and nurses that I talked to were really helpful and really nice. Any questions that I had were answered. Another thing that I could improve with this resource would be to make more of them. OSU’s campus is very large and making a 20 minute walk in the cold while being sick is hard. There could be smaller ones around campus that you could go to for smaller illnesses and the one in the center of campus could be the main office and the place where prescriptions are picked up if needed. I think that this would improve the effectiveness and ease of the student health center and allow more students to utilize this service.

This is a picture of the student health center. It looks like it is new and a clean building.

“Student Health Center.” OSU.edu, OSU, Columbus, greatvision.osu.edu/clinic/student-health-services.

I went to a seminar titled: High Performance Computing for Persistent Homology Computation. The seminar was given by Simon Zhang. He is a PhD student in computer science. I went to this seminar by myself. I think that I was the only undergraduate student there. There might have been a few but most of them looked older than I am. While I was at this seminar I didn’t feel that out of place until the seminar started. There were 15-20 people there. While I was there I didn’t talk to anybody. I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of a seminar. The only people that I saw were talking looked like they were the PhD student’s research adviser. While I was there I was not really able to understand much of what was said. I have only taken high school computer science courses so most of what was said went over my head. For the first couple minutes I was able to follow what his research was trying to accomplish. Once he started going into the algorithms and code I was unable to follow. From what I could gather Simon and his team were developing software to accelerate the processing of a boundary matrix. They also improved upon an existing program called Ripser and made it significantly faster. Part of the improvement that he and his team were making was that they were making the code specialized for specific parts of the computer, because the GPU and the CPU can do different things better. He said that he was putting the code online so that people can edit it and possibly improve on its design themselves. I think that this really help the academic community grow by diffusing their ideas to the most amount of people while also allowing people to improve on the design. This was different than I thought seminars would be run. I thought that the seminar would be very formal and there would be a tight script followed but it wasn’t like that. The seminar was much more relaxed than I thought it would be. I liked the format of a seminar more than I thought I would. As an undergraduate student I think that going to some seminars are important, especially if you are planning on going into research or graduate school. Seminars like these help to show what you will be doing while you are researching. It also help show what your major or area of study is actually like in the high academic area. I do think that going to seminars that are to advanced for one to understand are a waste of time. For me, this seminar was too advanced for me to understand so I learned nothing useful aside from how seminars are run. I am glad that I went though because now I’ll know not to go to seminars that are so advanced that I won’t get anything out of it.

This is a photo that I took while there. It outlines where most of the processing time goes in Ripser and in their version of Ripser.