10 Hour Spring Project

 

For my ten hour spring project, I wanted to learn to program in python, and so I decided to program this game of Snake. There were some challenges in completing this program, specifically learning how to use the color chooser and open it in the same window (which I still have not completely figured out), getting the overall high score for your computer at the top (instead of just the best score for that round), and just overall learning object oriented programming. Time management and motivation was not an issue for me because this was something I was super interested in and excited to learn.

There are some things that I would like to do differently in terms of adding to this code in particular. I think making a better user interface would be nice, such as having a start up menu, and then having the color chooser appear in the same window, and then maybe having a pause option with a quit button. It would be cool to play music too. This was a fun project for me to complete and I certainly learned a lot about python and programming in general.

Spring Project Intro

For my ten hour spring project, I intend to learn the programming language python. I want to do this by programming the simple game snake. If this project takes less than 10 hours, I then will learn how to process data within python and create visualizations of the data analysis.
Image result for Python snake and program

Diversity and Inclusion

T his week for my ePortfolio post, I attended the regular STEM Scholars Wednesday event in the journalism building. The speaker at this week’s event is a member of Ohio State’s Student Life Multicultural Center, which is a student life department that offers hundreds of events a year for cultural/heritage celebrations, leadership workshops, and diversity and inclusion events. The event for Wednesday was a diversity and inclusion general discussion. Going into the event, I felt that I already knew the material and was not gonna learn much from it because I had already attended other diversity events. I still felt a little uncomfortable, however, because even though I’d like to think that I am culturally aware and I try to promote inclusion, I am not very diverse being a white american male. Even with these thoughts in the back of my mind, I think that the speaker did a very good job presenting and I learned more than a few things from the discussion.

During a discussion about diversity and inclusion, privilege is bound to come up at some point. For me, and I think many others, privilege has a negative connotation to it. The speaker, however, did not talk about how privilege was bad and that if you were someone born with many privileges you should be ashamed, but instead discussed how people can not control their privilege. It is something that is not earned. One is born a mixture of privileges, and privilege ultimately has a role in societal powers. The speaker did talk about how that privilege can be abused, and that this typically hurts the minoritized groups in a society. Diversity conversations are to have often, because people do not want to offend others or they feel uncomfortable discussing differences between people, but I think these conversations are important to have in order to bring awareness to privileges and help people become better at the inclusion aspect of diversity and inclusion.

On a daily basis I do not often see privilege taking a huge role in people’s lives and interactions here at Ohio State, because of how diverse campus is, people just get treated like people, but this could also be due to my lack of awareness (of which I am trying to improve). I think that diversity and inclusion does impact science, technology, math, and engineering a lot, especially when media and news brings up talks about the lack of women or diversified groups in engineering. There are millions of smart people out there by which the STEM fields could certainly benefit, and many people get turned away to due to prejudices and privileges in the system. Thankfully, there are lot of opportunities at Ohio State for inclusion for minoritized groups, not only in STEM, but as a whole campus. There are STEM groups such as SWE (Society of Women Engineers) that advocate for more women in engineering, the Student Life Multicultural Center that puts on events to promote inclusion, and countless student organizations and clubs that promote diversity, and more importantly inclusion. Ohio State does a good job of promoting these groups and services to build a happier and more inclusive campus.

Campus Resource – Student Health Center

 

When I first saw that we needed to visit a non-academic resource for STEM scholars, I instantly thought that it would be the perfect opportunity to visit the Student Health Center again. I did consider a few of the other non academic resources such as the Career Services office, but I knew I was going to need to see a doctor soon anyways. The past few weeks I had been feeling pretty sick and could not stop coughing, so I scheduled an appointment. This was pretty easy to do, as I had scheduled an appointment here earlier this semester for a sinus infection. All I had to do to schedule was go online to my BuckMD, fill out a few things, and then schedule an appointment for a time that worked for me. I arrived only a minute early to my appointment, which meant that I was able to use the self check-in kiosks instead of checking in through patient registration. After I went upstairs to the central desk, I ended up having to wait awhile before I was called back into the office.

The appointment went very smooth and quick, and all the student practitioners and the doctor were very professional. It worked like a normal doctor visit, where a nurse took my blood pressure, height and weight, and asked some general health questions before the doctor came in. Then the doctor came in and was very friendly, and I just explained how I had been coughing for awhile. The doctor was quickly able to give me a diagnosis of bronchitis and gave me a prescription, which was conveniently filled downstairs in the pharmacy. I think the Student Health Center is an excellent student service on campus, and so far it has met and exceeded all of my expectations. Appointments are extremely easy to schedule and prescriptions can be conveniently be picked up in the pharmacy in the same building! They have not only have general care and checkup services, but physical therapy/sports medicine services, dental services, and everything to nutritional services.

I think one area that the Student Health Services could grow in is by putting an office on north campus. This would be better for people who live on north campus and are unable to make the trek to the Student Health Center. No one who has the flu in the winter wants to walk 20 minutes in the snow to get treatment. This probably would cost a lot of money to put an office up (even a small one) and to staff it with a couple of doctors and nurses, but it could make a world of difference to those who are sick on north campus.

While I did not end up visiting the Career Services resource, I think that I will visit it soon, because I have heard how helpful they can be. And by getting help now, I can better plan out the next few years of college and get my career started. Ohio State offers such a complete range of student services, and all the ones I have visited so far have been excellent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

STEM Seminar

When I saw the opportunity to attend a campus seminar event for STEM I was super excited. I had been wanting to attend one of the many intriguing and fascinating seminars on Ohio State’s campus, but had not set aside time to actually attend one yet. I opened the STEM calendar to see which seminars were to be presented in the next few days, and one immediately caught my eye: ‘Astronomy Colloquium – Determination of the Evolutionary States of Red Giant Stars.’ I have had a pretty strong interest in astronomy for years so I thought that this was the perfect one to attend over the biochem seminar offered around the same time. I had originally planned on going alone, but when I arrived to the lecture hall where the lecture was, several of my friends and even my roommate were there. This was nice because at least I was not the only undergraduate student, or at least freshmen, there.

Before the seminar actually started, several of the graduate students gave us looks when we sat down. The people behind us asked if we were astronomy majors or if we were first years, and also asked if we were part of their group of undergraduate students required to attend, which I did not realize that was something astronomy undergrads had to do. The seminar began when the professor introduced the graduate student, whose name was Mathieu Vrard from Paris, France. My first impressions from his presentations were not great, as he talked very quickly, quietly, and in a thick french accent, which made it very difficult to understand him. As the seminar went on, however, I felt like I was able to understand him better and better.

The seminar was interesting as it talked about new techniques and methods of determining the evolutionary states of Red Giant stars, which can be difficult as the evolution of the star depends on several factors. Mathieu had interned at an observatory in Paris and talked about how they compared and measured the pressure waves versus gravitational waves present in the star. By observing these types of seismological waves in the Red Giant stars, they discovered that the Red Giant star were special in that they had mixed modes, where the modes of the pressure waves and the modes of the gravitational waves can couple and become ‘mixed modes,’ but in main sequence stars, the frequencies of these oscillations are not similar. By measuring these mixed modes, they can put constraints on observing the Red Giant core structure. He then talked about 5 different methods in evaluating the mixed modes of Red Giants. The main differences in these methods were the amount of time to observe the stars (which was typically between 3 months to a year) and the accuracy and efficiency in determining the states of the stars. One of these methods were very interesting as it involved using artificial intelligence to look at thousands of stars and compare them, and then using a neural network, determine the state of a specific star.

This seminar intrigued me, even though when it first started I felt like I was not going to understand any of the content. I actually learned a lot from this seminar, not only about the actual content about stars, but also about how research in astronomy is conducted and presented. I think that as an undergraduate student, attending STEM seminars is a great way to get some experience in how STEM research works and also get connected to other people interested in the same subject. Going into the seminar I expected understand a little more than I actually did, but I was still able to learn a lot about the subject. Overall it was a good experience!

Academic Support and Advising

This week I visited the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering advising office to seek help. Setting up an appointment was super easy, as I only had to email my academic adivsor and give her times that I was available. I made an appointment with my academic advisor to discuss how I was struggling to figure out how to fit all of the major prerequisites in to my schedule in time to actually apply to my major. The experience of seeking help was not necessarily new to me, as I would occasionally discuss with my high school guidance counselors or teachers what were the best options for me and how I could improve myself as a student, but the experience was a whole lot better than high school. My high school counselors were always busy and not that helpful in discussing options and plans for classes to take and I would often leave frustrated. With my advisor, however, I was able to sit down with questions I had regarding the pre-major classes and what options I had to fit them into my schedule and my advisor was super helpful in discussing the best options I had and I left feeling much more hopeful and positive about my academic schedule. She used the aerospace engineering curriculum sheet to help explain and show me what classes I still had to take and how I could rearrange them to fit a few classes in. It was also nice to talk one on one and get personalized help instead of asking questions in a survey lecture hall of a few hundred students. Overall, it was an excellent experience and I will definitely be returning to the advising office for help.

Having academic advisors for each department is so incredibly useful to all of Ohio State University students, as they not only provide students help with educational plans and academic goals but helps connect students to different resources on campus. As long as each student puts in effort and seeks help from their advising office, they have another leg up in college and a much bigger chance of success. Other places that students can seek help at to improve their chances of success include the Dennis Learning Center for academic coaching, the Math and Statistics Learning Center, the Writing Center in Thompson Library, or any other department tutoring places such as Smith Lab for physics tutoring.

Having these support systems and tutors for students is an incredible resource for students, and it takes a lot of time and money for the university and the people who manage them. I think it would be interesting becoming involved with one of these support systems for students and helping them academically. It would be challenging but also rewarding to see people succeed. For me personally, I believe in the future I would be best suited to help tutor a subject that I knew best, such as math or physics. This would allow me to help people to the best of my abilities and give back to the student body in need of that resource.

BSLI Student Organization Experience

Recently, I attended several Buckeye Space Launch Initiative (BSLI) meetings, which turned out to be more complex than the name even suggests. I found BSLI while walking around the involvement fair on the OSU oval. The scarlet and gray rockets stood out among the countless tables, instantly drawing any engineer’s eyes to the booth. Rocketry had always piqued my interest, and seeing several rockets out on the oval moved me to investigate. After listening to the presentation given by the student in front of the rocket, I knew that this was the club for me. This organization is unique due to how it is managed. It works more like three groups in one. There are three different teams each researching and manufacturing three different products. There is the 30,000 ft. rocket team that competes in the Spaceport America competition in New Mexico, the NASA SLI team competing for NASA at the Marshall Flight Center in Huntsville, and the Liquid Propulsion research team, which hopes to develop a rocket engine that employs liquid fuel to reach space. Each group is so multi-faceted, with different subcommittees in charge of producing different parts of the rocket.

After attending the first general meeting for BSLI where all the groups meet together, I was sure I wanted to join the Liquid Propulsion research team and specialize in the combustion chamber and nozzle (known as the “hot stuff”) section of the engine. When I went to the first sub-team meeting for the Liquids group, I felt a little over my head. The group seemed to be made up of all second and third years who were already knowledgeable and experienced, with the exception of one other first year who I did not know. There was little introduction and we jumped right into research and modeling the rocket in the SolidWorks software, which I have zero experience with. The other first year, however, knew how to use the software a little, and helped me get a hang of the basics. Still I felt overwhelmed. I still am not sure what my final fit is in BSLI, but I am considering the NASA SLI team to help design the structure of the rocket.

After the Liquids group meeting, I attended the level 1 rocket certification meeting with my friend Nathan in order to learn rocket basics, rocket safety, and to be certified to fly low class rockets. This meeting felt a lot more comfortable and more designed toward first years, and having a friend there helped to process everything. I talked to the student leader after and learned that he was only a second year! He seemed super experienced and he was fun to talk with. I think most of the leaders in BSLI are interesting and cool, and very experienced with what they are doing. Personally, I would love to have the experience of being a leader in BSLI in the future. I think that by getting involved with BSLI, I can have real job experience related to my major of Aerospace engineering, and have fun while doing it. This could also be something that I can be proud to put on a future résumé and talk with an employer about. BSLI is not a club for everyone, but it is a club that I can definitely be involved in to get the most out of my college experience.

Year in Review

[ “Year in Review”  is where you should reflect on the past year and show how you have evolved as a person and as a student.  You may want to focus on your growth in a particular area (as a leader, scholar, researcher, etc.) or you may want to talk about your overall experience over the past year.  For more guidance on using your ePortfolio, including questions and prompts that will help you get started, please visit the Honors & Scholars ePortfolio course in Carmen. To get answers to specific questions, please email eportfolio@osu.edu. Delete these instructions and add your own post.]