beth's summer with the distributed mentor program
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Beth is a senior at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. There, she spends great amounts of time frantically studying and attempting to function properly on less than four hours of sleep. Beth is an honors double major in Latin and Computer Science, with a concentration in Peace and Conflict Studies. Sound intriguing? Well then maybe you'd be interested in hiring a Computer Scientist who can code in Perl, while translating Cicero and discussing human rights! Check out Beth's resume (or, for those who are postscript-inclined, download it) and give her a job!

When she is not studying, Beth enjoys a variety of frivolous activities, including improv comedy, computer games, and exploring the local Asian-fusion cuisine scene. She also serves as the Computer Science student representative to the Swarthmore Committee to Design a Unified Science Center. Beth was privileged to be hired as one of the Swarthmore Computer Science Program's system administrators and can often be found working on the CS server, allspice. Beth is also interested in the issue of women in Computer Science. She was fortunate to attend the 2000 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she spent 3 glorious days surrounded by over 500 women female Computer Scientists and learned all sorts of exciting things about both the issue of women in computing and current Computer Science research. She also had the priviledge of attending the first-ever Richard Tapia Symposium for Diversity in Computing, in Houston, Texas. There, Beth had the opportunity to attend various lectures and panels focusing on the issue of minorities in Computer Science. Beth has also been actively pursuing policies at Swarthmore to increase the number of women participating in computing at the college. Most recently, she has been responsible for arranging a group for women in Mathematics and Computer Science.

Beth is also one of the heads of the Swarthmore College branch of Amnesty International and recently had the honor of being hired by Ammesty as a Student Area Coordinater for the student groups in the Philadelphia area. She strongly believes in Amnesty's cause and is a strong supporter of the United Nations and their Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She encourages you to visit Amnesty's online home and urges you to consider writing a letter to help free a prisoner of conscience. Beth recently had the honor of being awarded an Amnesty International Patrick Stewart Human Rights Scholarship. As part of the scholarship, she went to Australia during the summer of 2000 to do indigenous rights work with the North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service in Darwin, Northern Territory. There, Beth worked on policy issues focusing on the unjust effects of the Territory's draconian mandatory sentencing ("3-strikes") laws on the Aboriginal population. Among her projects with NAALAS, she had the privilege in contributing to a submission to the United Nations under the First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights on behalf of an Aboriginal client. The submission argued that that mandatory sentencing had violated the human rights of the client.

During the summer of 2001, Beth was privileged to receive a grant to do research from the Computer Research Association's Distributed Mentor Program. Through the program, she had the opportunity to participate in Computer Science research with Professors Nancy Amato, Jennifer Welch and Jennifer Walter at Texas A&M University. Beth's research currently focuses on distributed algorithms for systems of metamorphic robots. Most recently, the results of her work were presented at the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

During the 3 months of the year when she is not living in her palatial dorm room at Swarthmore, Beth resides in Wayne, Mainline Pennsylvania.