My lab has extended me an opportunity to be a research scientist and helping out our current senior data scientist with the daily analytics and IT support the lab needs. It’s a very enticing opportunity, but I need to stop and think about my options I’d get paid more! What kind of graduate student would not want that? But I would really need to consider and clarify with my advisor and rest of my lab how this can fit in with my PhD.
“Open” has played in important role in my life the last few years. It all began when I was an attendee at a Software-Carpentry workshop back in 2013. Before then, I only knew about Open Access and Open Source, but wasn’t active in any Open community. This week is Open Data Week at Virginia Tech, and it begins with an “Open Research/Open Data Forum [on] Transparency, Sharing, and Reproducibility in Scholarship”, which I was honored to be apart of.
As people start sharing their educational experiences from around the world, I realized how lucky I am to have been educated in New York City, and how much less the United States focuses on education when compared to many other countries around the world.
Coming from CUNY Hunter College, I never really had the typical ‘college experience’. Going to college for me was almost no different than going to high school since so many people were commuters; there was no campus, especially when compared to Virginia Tech. I snowboard. After not going during the 2 years of my master’s, I decided the first thing I did when I started Tech was to find the ski/snowboarding club and go on a big winter trip.
How faculty (higher education) are using and/or reacting to social media, MOOCs, and/or other “disruptive” technologies. One of my favorite talks is the one given by Greg Wilson at Scipy 2014 about the lessons learned from Software-Carpentry. Software-Carpentry aims to teach the Best Practices for Scientific Computing. Scientific computing is a skill lacking in education, especially in higher education where research is being performed. What is lacking in scientific computing education is the lack of courses for the researcher, rather than the computer scientist.
My previous blog post summarized the main points of the Watts 2002 paper. At the very end of the post I mentioned ways we can extend the Watts model with neural-networks. Here I outline the steps of the neural-network simulation. Generally the model goes though an initiation step, a simulation step, and a cleanup step. In the initiation step, the agents are created and connected in a network. Then selected agents are seeded with a value before continuing onto the simulation step.
I’ve been asked a few times about whether one should attend graduate school. I usually follow up by asking whether they are planning to do a Master’s or a Doctorate. If it’s a master’s, sure, why not. Master’s programs are typically no longer than 2 years and very well structured. You come in with a cohort of students, and everyone struggles together and becomes friends. PhD programs are much more variable and different.
Software-Carpentry played an integral part of who I am today. I am always trying to learn and follow best practices in the context of scientific programming, which I think is a neglected area in research. The fundamental problem is the incentive structure in academia, where productivity is measured by the number of papers published. The downside of tis pressure is that quality of analytics and code will suffer to get the results for the paper.
How did I get to where I am today. This is my story. Early I’ve always been surrounded by computers. My parents both studied Computer Science, and my dad holds a Master’s in Computer Science and works as a software developer. Growing up, all my computers were company hand-me-downs, but it allowed me to be lucky enough to always have a computer in the house. I liked to tinker, not as a programmer, or hacker, but more of a user.
I’m from New York City. Born and raised in Queens, and went to school in Manhattan for high school, college, and masters. So, coming down to rural Blacksburg, VA has been a big change in scenery. Blacksburg is a beautiful town. There are many aspects of the area that I love: clean air, quiet, and plenty of outdoor activities. As someone pursuing a PhD, I am essentially a professional student, so the lack of distractions is much appreciated.