~ About Me ~

Name: Nataliya Lozova
College: Louisiana State University - http://www.lsu.edu
Major: Computer Science - http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/
Minor: Mathematics - http://math.lsu.edu/
Year: Senior
Expected graduation date: Spring 2006
Email: nlozov1@lsu.edu


My life in Baltimore County
My new friends in Baltimore County


My life in Baltimore County

    First week finished. It was little bit hard and confusing for me, because instead of fully concentrating on the working process, unexpected problems appeared, such as access to the lab at night, moving into another apartment, creating an almost suitable comfort for life, etc. Also, sinking in "full English speaking environment" was not very easy by itself. My native language is Ukrainian, so my English isn't all that great.
    I'm very glad, though, that I met a very friendly, helpful and conscious team-worker and their boss, which is right now my boss, too. Especially, my gratitude goes to Blazej (my train was 2 hours late and he was waiting at the station; without his help I probably wouldn't even be able to get a place for the night) and Mark (he helped me with shopping and lost a lot of his time in the supermarkets).
    Unexpectedly, Mark invited all people from the lab to a party. Because I don't have a car, I was fully dependent on Blazej's offer to give a lift to the party. Blazej is a graduate student who works in the lab which now is my workplace, too. The party was great and very relaxing. I received a lot of positive emotions. Everybody had fun. There were a lot of international students at the party. We talked about life, education, and politics in different parts of the world. Some people were telling jokes and some were dancing. That was the right kind of atmosphere to ease me into my newfound environment.
    On June 18, I invited our lab to a party. I wanted to get to know everybody a little bit better. Around 20 people came to this “get together,” which was held outside in the fresh air on the campus grounds. Everybody had a great time. I cooked a lot of Ukrainian food and barbeque. This party lasted up until somewhere around midnight.
    On July 8, I went up to New York to visit my family. We went to see “Hairspray” at the Neil Simon theatre. I was very surprised since this play was about Baltimore University. On Sunday, we went up to a little town called Hunter, upstate New York. I went up to Hunter a couple of times before, and I really like this place. It’s surrounded by mountains, and the nature reminds me of Ukraine. It even has a Ukrainian church. The mountain air is very fresh and clean; forests, rivers and small lakes bring back memories of the Carpathian Mountains, back in Ukraine. My niece, her mother and I went to the forest to gather mushrooms. Afterwards, we cooked the mushrooms and ate them with mashed potatoes.
    On the way from Baltimore to New York and back I was hoping to investigate local nature, but its view is blocked by the walls on the interstate; therefore, I got left with nothing to do except read papers about clustering algorithms.
    Two weeks ago, my son visited me up here in Baltimore, to whom I couldn’t exactly show much attention, because I was too busy with the project. We only got the chance to go swimming at the campus swimming pool and go to the inner Harbor, downtown Baltimore. Unexpectedly, the inner Harbor appeared to be a very nice place to visit. We wanted to visit the aquarium, but we got there a little bit too late and the ticket counter was already closed. We also made plans to go visit Washington, D.C. but could not go there because of all the work I had to do. It was my dream to go to Washington during my internship, but it didn’t happen. In the future, however, I plan to make a trip to Washington, whenever I have the time. My son had to leave very early, because his school started on August 10.
    On August 4, Eric invited everybody to “Jesus Christ Superstar,” a rock-opera of the last seven days of Jesus’ life written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, where Eric plays one of the lead villains; so, this was a very good chance to get to see him totally out of character and hear him sing. Unfortunately, the last few days in Baltimore are very loaded with final work and documentation, so I had to miss out on that opportunity and not go to the play.
    The only thing I allowed myself to do during this internship was to go to the pool once a week to relax. This helped me refill my energy after a long time of staring at a monitor.
    During the last week of my internship, our lab had two very short “good-bye” parties – an ice cream party, organized by our mentor; a cake party, organized by me.
    Good bye, Baltimore! I haven’t seen as much as you have to offer but during my stay I experienced great new knowledge and a whole another level of my view at applied programming in Java; both of which I implemented in my project, which I consider amazing..


My new friends in Baltimore County

	Name: Marc Pickett I Link: http://www.coral-lab.org/~marc I have never before in my life seen anybody that loves life more than Marc. He always smiles and is the most down-to-earth person I've met. He is like a Leonardo da Vinci of the computer age. Unfortunately for me, he is on vacation in Europe.
	Name: Priyang Rathod Link: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~prathod1/ Priyang, just like myself, prefers to work at night. It's nice to have somebody in the lab in the middle of the night to accompany me at work.
	Name: Blazej Bulka Link: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~bulka1/ Without Blazej's help and suggestions, it would have been much harder for me to get to the point in the project that I am at now. He always kept my system up-to-date and working. Blazej is the perfect photographer and I recommend visiting his website to look at his albums.
	Name: Eric Eaton Link: http://maple.cs.umbc.edu/~ericeaton/ Eric, a leading actor in the play "Jesus Christ Superstar", a singer, a dancer. But his greatest passion - computers.
	Name: Julia Ferraioli Link: http://maple.cs.umbc.edu/~jferraio/ Julia and I work and live together.