This week I went to a presentation about identity put on by the Ohio State Multicultural Center. I was excited for the event because I find issues of identity and representation very interesting, and I wanted to learn more about the subject. Even though I had already seen the same presentation given by a different presenter in my survey class, I still found it interesting because the group was different. This group was more talkative and involved in the discussion than my class was. It made the environment much more engaging and the presentation more meaningful. People actually volunteered to speak after a couple awkward silences. The biggest difference was that in my class, the answers that people eventually gave were just the most obvious one word answers, while at this presentation, people tried to give well thought out responses. The last time I saw the presentation, the majority of the class’s discussion was focused on how identity is affected by being in STEM, specifically computer science. The female and black students talked a lot about how it is very uncomfortable to be such a small minority in the field. They also shared that it  was uncomfortable in classes here. This is really obvious to me too when I walk into my computer science class. Unlike other classes, there are only a couple of women. This issue also presents itself at the University level. Walking around campus it is pretty clear that the student body is mostly white and Asian. Despite this, it seems to me that the University does put enough emphasis on diversity. With so many diversity based clubs, I think a lot of students of minorities can find a community on campus. They also are great opportunities for students to learn more about other cultures and hear other people’s stories. Many of the clubs also bring all kinds of people together by offering what all college students love: free food. I also think the University does a great job of promoting students to think about diversity more. Multiple times a week, diversity is brought up as a talking point in one of my classes. My English class specifically covers issues of representation, identity, and diversity almost every meeting. Because of the University’s great focus on diversity, I think that few of my beliefs were challenged because they were already challenged earlier in the year. I had already thought about a lot of the topics presented before and adapted my beliefs. In this way, I think I have changed my outlook a lot since I’ve been here. Despite this, the presenter still did a great job of engaging me in the material. She seemed genuinely excited to cover the slides and really help the audience think about what they were saying. Not that this was particularly untrue the first time; this presenter just had more energy. I think she also did a really good job of expanding on the information in the slides by really giving really well thought out responses to the questions that were asked. She also did a great job of recommending other resources that could fill in the gaps in her knowledge.

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.

Last week in English 1110.01, First Year English Composition, I had a paper due analyzing the primary source of my choice. I decided to go to the writing center in Smith Lab to help me with it and hopefully learn something. I wrote a rough draft and went through a couple rounds of editing before I went so that I did not have to waste time going over grammatical mistakes. Personally, I do have a stigma against seeking help. I think this comes from my engineering way of thinking: either it is good or it is not. Seeking help means to me that your work isn’t good and you’ve failed. Usually, I will only go to get help if I feel like I will not be able to figure it out on my own. Because of this and the fact that I have not really needed it, this was a new experience for me. I have only gone to seek help when I missed a significant amount of school. This was really only a couple of times and I just went to my dad for help with math. I knew coming into college that this would have to change and that I specifically needed help with writing. I do not think I was taught to write very well in high school. It was my plan to go and have the writing center help me on my first paper, so I did. They gave me a lot of great advice about how to strengthen my writing rather than just making corrections. This was exactly what I wanted and it was super helpful. When I went in I told them that and they did a really good job at gearing their critique. I think they helped me make a much better argument and hopefully helped me get a better grade. Most importantly, I feel better prepared for writing my best paper and what to think about in the writing process. I think the best advice I got was to really keep my thesis in mind when I write each supporting detail and argument. Going through my paper and doing this I think my argument became much more cohesive and convincing. For the most part, they helped me make these improvements by leading my to fixing it on my own by asking me questions. I think this is the best way to learn a skill meaningfully. I love that process which is why I think I would like to be a tutor. I have always thought that explaining something to people in a way that makes sense was a skill of mine. I think I got this skill from my parents; they are both teachers. If teachers were paid what they deserve, I would probably follow in their footsteps. I really like helping other people academically and I would love to make some money doing it. I want to get a math minor and I would love to tutor math or work as a teaching assistant.

On my first day at OSU, my roommate, who I had never met before, invited me to go to an ACM-W ice cream social in the number garden. All of the student leaders and other members were very welcoming quick to start conversations. Everybody there was excited to meet and get to know new members of the club and the Ohio State community. They asked about what I was interested in and immediately gave me advice on how to pursue those interests further. Upperclassmen in the club made it clear from the start that they were a resource to turn to for help and advice. I think this mindset of growth was so evident because of both the purpose of the club and the student leaders. The club has a foundation of inclusivity and welcoming. I joined the GroupMe for the club so I could stay up to date on meeting times and locations as well as to keep an ear open for other related opportunities. When they announced the second meeting, I got together with a couple other people on my floor to bring to the event. All of the student leaders in the club formally introduced themselves to the group then split us up into groups for ice-breakers. Everyone else there seemed just as excited and on board as I was; it was a fun environment. The next club event was a presentation by Northrop Grumman about how their company is involved in reverse engineering and how that relates to the field of computer science. The presentation was super interesting and very informative. He showed off Ghidra, an open source application created by the NSA for reverse engineering. First, he went over a basic example of using Ghidra to find an exploitable flaw in some demo code. The program asked for a 64 bit string input to register a new account but tried to store that information in a 32 bit variable. He explained that the remaining 32 bits of input could be used to insert a malicious shell program into the source code of the program that could have access to all kinds of secure information associated with account registering. After this, he stepped it up a lot with the second demo to a much more realistic example. The source code created by ghidra was stripped, meaning all of the values were non-descriptive and very hard to read. He showed how the application allowed the code to be split up into more readable sections and how this process allowed you to quickly build a better understanding of the program as a whole. Finally, he talked about something that I found super interesting: reverse engineering competitions. The second demo was actually an example problem from the largest of these competitions. Even though I only understood the problem at a very basic level, it’s definitely something that I’m interested in learning more about. ACM-W seems very passionate about creating opportunities to get involved and engaged with learning in the field of computer science. I can’t wait to continue my involvement with them.

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