Life at USF
The first week:
I arrived at the Tampa Airport on Monday afternoon, after a rather bumpy but incredibly scenic flight (the Gulf of Mexico from a plane is beautifully sparkly!), and, after getting temporarily lost in the airport due to my lack of experience with flying and strange airports, I met Dr. Murphy herself for the ride to USF's campus. Dr. Murphy and I went through a lot of getting-to-know-you type questions during the 45 minutes or so that it took us to creep our way through all the rush-hour traffic, and she gave me a lot of information about USF, Tampa, and Florida in general. Once we reaches USF's campus, she gave me a bit of a driving tour, before helping me to check into my dorm complex, Magnolia Apartments, and informing me that a group of the students employed in her lab wanted to take me out to supper. I quickly hooked up with the supper group, and Dr. Murphy went off home to sleep, since she had been very busy and sleep deprived for the previous several days.
The supper group was exclusively male (excluding me, of course) because the rest of the lab's women occupants were either away or otherwise occupied, but the guys made me feel quite at home very quickly with their openness and good humor. Due to my abysmal memory for names, I am still unsure of most of the dining party's names, but I do know that included were the other two students working on the project that I was assigned to, Denny Catacora (a grad student from, I believe, Peru) and Rod Gutierrez (also a grad student), as well as Brian Day, who, when I started asking questions about good places to buy food and other things hard to cram into a single suitcase, immediately offered to take me shopping after our meal. We enjoyed a nice meal at a very good Mexican restaurant, Brian took me on a lovely food-buying spree, and then I worked on unpacking and putting stuff away in my room until it was time to go to bed. I'm living in an apartment that consists of a kitchen/living room area, a nice bathroom, and three single bedrooms. Obviously this means that I have two roommates, who are both very nice people.
I spent the morning of my first whole day on campus running all over the place trying to get all my necessary paperwork and such done, though a few of the tasks took bits of the next few days to complete totally. Thankfully everyone that I dealt with was very friendly and helpful, and things weren't nearly as painful as they might have been. That afternoon Dr. Murphy, Denny, Rod and I had a meeting in which they filled me in on our project's current state and goal, and what my part would be. Then, I spent most of the rest of the week working on reading research papers, since my first task is to do research on what others have done in the way of terrain cover recognition and learning with robots.
I must say that the thing that's taken the most getting used to has been simply being in Florida. For one thing, there are palm trees everywhere, not something that a lifetime Kentuckian is used to. Secondly, the place is crawling with small lizards, though this isn't particularly a bad thing, because they're really quite cute. Thirdly, I am convinced that this entire place doesn't contain a speck of soil; it's all sand. Even the lawns are simply grass growing in sand, and the sand's not just a surface-deep thing, because there's a construction site near where I'm living, and there're huge piles of sand sitting around where they've been digging. I think I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the sand, because sometimes it seems very pretty and fun to walk through, and at other times (mostly when I'm walking long distances in the sun), it makes me feel like I'm trapped in a desert, despite all the foliage.
The second week:
This is hands-down the most diverse place that I've ever been. Back home is a small town in Kentucky, where racial diversity consists of about six black people and a bunch of inevitably-Mexican immigrants that richer people have hired to work their tobacco. Not exactly cosmopolitan. My regular college is a small private school, which requires either a certain money or academic threshold to be able to attend. It's much more diverse than my high school was, but its still in a pretty small town and the non-white-American segment of the student body is perhaps 10-15%. Here, utterly different story. Among the people working on various projects in the Computer Science/Engineering field there is a guy from Peru, a guy from Russia, a guy from India or somewhere close by, and then maybe ten Americans. On my dorm hall, out of the few people that I've actually met face to face there is a black girl, a guy from Vietnam, and another guy who might be Chinese. Walking past faculty offices I see plenty of Indian, Asian, and sometimes European (French, German, etc.) names. Campus staff, from the Human Resources office to the maintenance crew, are largely "minorities".
I went to a workshop on getting into graduate school yesterday. It was a very informative workshop, and I'm very glad that I went. They talked about how the application process works, and what you can do to make your application stand out. They really emphasized the importance of doing research as an undergraduate, since one of the things that one tends to do at the graduate level is research, and having experience with it before you even get to grad school is very helpful. Even better if you've presented your research or had a paper published about it. A good bit of advice: take the GRE as soon as possible, probably sometime in your junior year of undergrad. The GRE is like the ACTs or SATs for grad school, and most grad schools require a minimum grade on the GRE before they'll even consider you. Oh, and forty percent of the people in the room were from Puerto Rico. I love diversity, it's so much more interesting!
The third week:
It seems that living in the city has perks besides diversity after all! Over the weekend I walked to the nearby mall, had lots of fun window-shopping (I'm trying to restrain my cash outflow), and saw a movie. I'm incredibly glad that there is a movie theatre near enough for me to walk to, since I don't have a car, am not very good friends with anyone with a car, and hate buses, because there are so many movies coming out this summer that I really want to see in theatres! The new Harry Potter movie, for instance. I'd have been downright depressed if I was trapped far away from a theatre when that came out! I've also found a very excellent bakery, also within walking distance, which makes me quite deliriously happy since I'm basically a bread-ivore.
Apparently I still haven't learned my lesson about the capriciousness of the weather here. A smart person here pretty much always carries an umbrella with them, because it can start raining at a moment's notice. Yet, when I set off with my laptop to give my presentation, I didn't take my umbrella. This, naturally, led to me walking back in the rain. When I left the engineering building, it was merely drizzling, so I figured that I could get back to my dorm with minimal dampness. By the time I was halfway, however, the drizzle had picked up into fully fledged rain, and by the time I walked another ten feet, it was outright pouring. Normally I wouldn't have really minded, since I love walking in the rain, but I had my laptop with me, and rain and laptops don't mix. Fortunately my laptop bag is pretty waterproof, and even though it's messenger-bag style and doesn't zip, the seal at the top is fairly tight. Also, I was able to ride out the majority of the downpour under the roof of the RA office/laundry facility en route to my dorm. And I thought Kentucky weather was crazy!
The fourth week:
I went to a highly useful seminar this week about how to write research papers for submission to conferences. One important part of doing research is publishing said research, obviously, and conferences are one very good place to get one's paper published. Given that I spent my first few weeks here reading conference-published research papers, I already have a general idea of the guidelines for writing such a paper, though having the rules and formats explained explicitly was very useful. I think that I'm required to write a paper on this research at the end of it, so I'm sure that that seminar will come in handy pretty soon!
Florida weather sure is interesting! There've been thunderstorms every day this week, though of course they've been mixed in with liberal amounts of sunlight, as per the summer-in-Florida norm. The humidity's been murder, though, as one would expect when the weather alternates between rain and blazing sunlight at least twice a day. I can't believe my stay here is almost half over already...
The fifth week:
I'm really starting to like photographing palm trees. I'm a fairly avid photographer with a bent for the artistic and a definite obsession with light and shadows, and I'm discovering that palm trees can cast some seriously cool shadows! I spent quite a bit of this weekend wandering around campus taking pictures of basically everything, and most especially palm trees. I'm beginning to really like the palm trees in general, and I think I'll probably miss them the most of anything when I go back home. That sounds kind of weird, but I've always been rather more interested in the natural aspect of places than the man-made stuff, and sometimes even more than the people! I also realized this weekend that I hadn't yet actually touched a palm tree, so while I was wandering around photographing, I made sure to do plenty of tactile exploration as well. Very wet palm trees feel rather spongy, it turns out. Some of the trees had ferns growing in the crevices in their bark, which I find very cool. I also saw some interesting orange daisy-shaped flowers that we definitely don't have in Kentucky, which is a shame, because they're quite beautiful! Oh, how I love nature!
The sixth week:
I think I've experienced more thunderstorms in the past six weeks here than I had in the previous year or two. For at least the past two weeks, it's thunderstormed at least once a day. The general pattern is that it's sunny and hot in the morning, then it starts to cloud up around noon, thunder starts in the distance around 1 PM, and by 2 PM it's raining like a hurricane's on the way, accompanied by thunder and lightning fierce enough to convince even the most atheistic among us that God's really, really pissed off about something. Since I'm quite the fan of thunderstorms, I love every minute of it, even though the more earsplitting thunderclaps can be quite startling, especially if you're outside at the time. I was walking back from the mall on Tuesday, where I had gone to eat supper at a quite excellent Japanese place, and all meteorological hell broke loose when I was about a third of the way back. I took refuge in a restaurant with a front sitting area until the lightning started striking things more than a mile away, then continued my walk back, still accompanied by rain. It sure is a good thing that I love walking in the rain! You almost have to, to live in this crazy place...
My dorm's going to be getting emptier in the next few weeks, because the other REU's are all wrapping up either this week or in the next few weeks. Both of my roommates are going to be gone in the next few weeks. I'll be sad to see them go, because they're both really cool people, but it'll also be pretty cool having the whole apartment to myself for the remainder of my time here! :)
The seventh week:
On Sunday Dr. Murphy held a bit of a party at her house for all the robotics-related people, including me, obviously. On the way to her house, I noticed another difference between KY and FL: no siding. We were driving through suburbs and such and I was seeing more houses than I had so far here, and I suddenly realized that none of them had siding. All the houses were either brick or what I assume is stucco. Such choices in building exteriors make perfect sense, of course, since a hurricane plus a house with siding probably equals a naked house. It still surprised me to notice this, though. More differences awaited me at Dr. Murphy's house, from the screened-in pool (apparently just about everyone with a house has a pool, since they can be used year-round and are therefore easy to maintain), to the pond and swamp behind their house which apparently contain an alligator (though I didn't get to see it), to the pineapples that they had growing in their yard. Besides a lot of good food and fun conversation, we also watched a Japanese-made series of short videos about robots and issues related to them. For example, one of the videos dealt with the ethical entanglements involved in true AI (what do you do when you've made a machine that's as intelligent as a human, but that has no human rights?), and another about human-robot interaction.
The eight and ninth weeks:
Life? What life? I've been trying to get my part of this crazy project done!
More seriously, with my departure back home fast approaching, I am beginning to think about things that I will miss once I leave USF. I really like all the people I've been working with, and Tampa and USF themselves are very nice places. I'm definitely going to miss the palm trees, the sand, and the crazy little lizards. They give the place such character!
Overall, I am satisfied with this research experience, and am glad that I was able to participate in the Distributed Mentor Project. Dr. Murphy has been a great mentor and very helpful! She took me out to lunch yesterday and gave me a whole lot of very good feedback about my abilities as a researcher and presenter, some pointers as to how I can become better at both, and some more good tips and advice about grad school and so on. I sure hope that I can remember all of the stuff people have told me about grad school and research this summer!