This page will detail some of my work experiences. For my academic experiences, please see my Projects page or my Courses page.
Human Factors Undergraduate Research Assistant (August 2021 – present)
I’m currently an undergraduate research assistant at a human factors lab for Rice University’s Department of Psychological Sciences. I assist in a project that focuses on the effect of vision loss on how people judge when to cross the street. Although the research is within Rice’s psychology department, the principal investigator often recruits computer science students to help with technological tasks.
The lab uses Unity and VR for experimentation. I mainly resolve issues in a Unity project that simulates macular degeneration by projecting a central blur into the lab’s Vive headset. For example, I solved several compiler errors in the project that prevented it from being run.
One of the team’s responsibilities is manually checking that trial data arguments were consistent between an initial .CSV file and a generated .JSON file after small and subtle errors had previously been discovered. Since this task is especially laborious, I am currently working on creating a program to automate this process.
This semester, I will learn how to run participants and collect data from experiments.
Teaching Assistant (March 2021 – December 2021)
I have TAed for two courses: Rice’s ELEC 220 (Fundamentals of Computer Engineering) and Rice’s COMP 140 (Computational Thinking).
I joined the ELEC 220 instructor team in Spring 2021. As a TA, I joined interactive lab sessions and assisted students in hardware (LaunchPad board built around ARM Cortex-M4 based microcontroller) and coding issues (in Code Composer Studio using C).
In the following fall semester, I was hired as an out-of-class TA for COMP 140. I held weekly office hours, which mainly consisted of answering students’ questions on lecture content and code debugging. I graded assignments, which consisted of a coding portion and a write-up portion; I also graded exams. I will return to the COMP 140 team in Fall 2022 as head grader.
Student Computing Consultant (January 2020 – May 2021)
During my freshman and sophomore years, I worked as a student computing consultant for Rice’s Office of Information Technology. As an SCC, I learned to troubleshoot, research, and fix various technological issues.
I experienced this job both in-person and remotely. As a new hire, I had new tech experiences, such as taking apart laptops for various purposes (e.g. extracting the hard drive). I’d never seen the “guts” of a laptop before, so this was especially interesting!
As someone who had no previous IT experience, I picked up a lot from my environment and from my own exploration.
Student Worker for Faculty Coordinators (September 2019 – May 2020)
During my freshman year at Rice, my first on-campus job was assisting faculty coordinators at the Jones Graduate School of Business.
I took on various tasks, including assembling kits for use in class, sorting mail, recording data in spreadsheets, and assembling gifts for guests.