When I saw that I was required to visit a non academic campus resource, I saw it as the motivation I needed to see a doctor on campus about restarting physical therapy. I had a bad sports injury to my leg in high school and the physical therapy I did right after was only enough to get me back to day-to-day functionality. Although I am definitely grateful to recover this much, I want more. I really want to be able to do intramural and pick-up sports with my friends in college. Skiing is also my absolute favorite hobby and even though I was able to do it last winter, I had to end each day early due to pain. My goal for this winter is to be able to keep up with my family all day. I feel like my movement is greatly restricted because I can’t run right now. Being able to sprint again is definitely another major goal of mine. In high school, I wanted to walk on to the football team wherever I went to school. I don’t know if that’s still a goal of mine but I would like to have it as an option. Right now there is now way I could play at all, but I think that with a lot of hard work that could be a possibility for my future. I scheduled an appointment online through My BuckMD so I didn’t have much of a wait when I got there. Unfortunately, the person I saw wasn’t able to prescribe physical therapy, so they recommended me to a specialist. I’m going to try to make an appointment with the specialist next week and hopefully start physical therapy soon after. Before I can do this however, I have to get my medical records sorted out and updated. Because all of my treatment was through our team doctor, my x-ray and MRI don’t appear anywhere. The only thing that shows up is that I had physical therapy for a sports related injury. Overall, I was satisfied with my visit because I know the doctor did the most for me that they could, but I wish they could have just referred me directly to physical therapy on campus. I think OSU’s campus resources are incredible. They were definitely one of my biggest reasons for choosing to go to school here. I knew that I would have access to amazing benefits like health care, tons of fun community events, and plenty of help in the job search process closer to graduation. Even though a lot of the other schools I visited had these resources, only Ohio State made them the main focus of their tour. I think I was most impressed by Thompson Library and the RPAC. Having so many resources shown to me that weren’t related to academics really made me feel like I could see myself living on campus. It also showed me that there was so much more to this community than just academics. 

This week I went to a seminar put on by the math department on campus. A graduate student presented his research in finding a faster algorithm for calculating persistent homology. Persistent homology is an algebraic method for measuring topological surfaces represented by a cloud of points. The student claimed that in testing his algorithm beat the standard algorithm’s speed by 116 times and the current fastest method by 10 times. He accomplished this by greatly reducing the number of comparisons that are made and by reducing the amount of data that needs to be moved. From what I understood, the data points are put into a matrix and each column is gone through sequentially and is analyzed. I did not understand the exact reasoning and methodology of how his proof but he found some way to predict the size of each column each column and row and some way to predict what was in other columns. He also did this using read only operations, which are much faster than writing. I went to the seminar alone, and I think I was the only undergraduate student in the room. The presenter frequently pointed out certain aspects of his approach that he said should be obvious to everyone in the room even though I didn’t understand at all. I was expecting to feel discouraged by this, but I didn’t. It was clear that everyone else in the room has had so much more education than me that I was proud at how much I did understand. I was proud of myself for making the attempt to learn something so challenging. I knew that asking every question I had would completely out of place since everyone else’s questions were even more confusing than the presentation, so I didn’t talk to anyone. Even though I didn’t follow the presentation very well, I know that it was my education that was holding me back, so I felt like I could do the same kind of research with more background in computer science and math. The student’s proofs weren’t overly complicated, only a couple steps each. I know that I would also be able to do the same kind of work in the future. Overall, the seminar was very similar to what I expected. I already knew what to expect from graduate computer research because my dad is an algorithm researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. I’ve always liked to hear his explanations of the problems that he is working on and I think I usually understand a similar percent of the problem. I usually understand the abstract question but all of the math and work goes way over my head, only understanding bits and pieces. I like the idea of contributing to academic knowledge though. I want to do original work, not just repeat what others have already done. I would like to publish research of my own as an undergraduate. I would also love to publish work with my dad. It’s a dream of his, and I think it would be super fun.