beth's summer with the distributed mentor program
home :: beth :: mentors :: paper :: presentations :: simulator :: inside :: outside :: experience
During the week, I spent all my time on the Texas A&M Campus. It's a huge place (you probably could fit three Swarthmores inside the TAMU campus) and it took 10 minutes to walk from my dorm to the building where I worked each morning. Here, I've documented my life at TAMU in pictures. Between my tiny dorm with with the extra-large cockroaches and the freezing cold computer lab, it was quite an experience.

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The lovely TAMU watertower. Such affirmations of Aggie pride are everywhere in College Station, Texas.

McInnis dorm - my home away from home. Don't let the lovely exterior fool you. In reality, it's a cockroach infested hole.

This is my dorm room at TAMU. I took this photo from a particular angle to make the room look bright and palatial. I also killed all the bugs I could find and swept away the beetle carcasses before taking this shot. Wow. Don't you wish you lived here? :)

This is Susan, outside my doomroom, preping a miniature dragon for painting. Ah, what you do when you're spending a summer in College Station!

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Every day I go to work at the Harvey "Bum" Bright building. It's awfully large. Or else I'm awfully small. Take your pick.

Life in the lab is always interesting, thanks students like Erin, Roger and Jinsuck. Erin's modeling dinosaurs on the computer, Roger and Jinsuck are doing work robot motion planning. Sandhu also works on robot motion planning...when he's not eating, that is.
Susan Lin is my fellow Distributed Mentor Program grant recipient, liberal sister and Iron Chef fanatic. She keeps me sane and entertained. Here she is working on her protein folding research. A day in the lab wouldn't be complete without watching Derek pick his nose. That's Rodrigo in the background, desperately trying to ignore what's going on beside him.

They gave me an office here! They also gave me a computer named Columbo! Ok, Columbo's a Sun Sparc Station 4, but it still makes me happy!

Here I am! Hard at work on the reconfiguration simulator for our research!

We have a few Windows boxes in the lab. Jenny taught me how to use Power Point on them so I could give a presentation about our research to the other undergraduate researchers.

Twice during the summer, all of the undergraduate researchers had the opportunity to present their work to their fellow students. Here are all of Nancy's undergraduate researchers at the final presentation (clockwise from top left: Jinsuck (grad student), Sandhu, Nancy, Erin, Roger, Susan, Derek, Me, Rodrigo).

The summer researchers (plus Jennifer and Jenny this time) outside after the presentations.

Nancy and the mobile robot guys.

Me and Jenny fight the AC by wearing our coats indoors!

The TAMU DMP women (l to r): Nancy, Me, Susan, Jennifer and Jenny.