After a crazy week last week, I finally got some exciting results on Monday. Talk about cutting it close! It was really rewarding to discover that my application could improve efficiency by a factor of 2 or more. Essentially, in certain types of Markovian streams, efficiency would decrease drastically with the input of increasingly complex queries. Backward processing in these cases maintained a constant efficiency, and eliminating false positives is truly effective. Please visit the Research page to read my final report, which discusses this in greater detail.
Monday and Tuesday were spent working on my poster in preparation for the poster fair on Wednesday. I will be very honest and admit I procrastinated tremendously on designing a solid poster, and paid for my inefficiency with a couple very late evenings. Lesson learned, and poster created.
A note on time management. I have found that in undergraduate Engineering school, spending excessive time on assignments or in the library becomes something of a trophy affair. Many students brag about awesome all night studying sprees or compete over how many hours we spend in the library. This approach is rather unsustainable in graduate school and professional life.
In that vein, I would like to share a really great bit of feedback that I later received from Julie, my graduate student. She articulated the difference between undergraduate and graduate work in a really neat way with regard to time management. She suggested that my main focus should become doing the best I can given a limited chunk of time, rather than attempting to extend myself to satisfy perfectionism. Very valuable advice, and definitely something I intend to apply to my studies this quarter and other aspects of life.
Magda and Julie gave me excellent feedback and great goals to work on as I prepare for graduate school. I feel like I really accomplished something this summer, and contributed to my group. My application functions, it will serve a useful role, and I learned as much about doing research as I did about technical skills related to my project.
What now?
Since I cut it rather close with my project and the UW poster fair, I have run behind on my final paper and other tasks. Though I will be flying home in the next couple of days, I intend to finish that paper as quickly as possible after that, as well as my website and a redesign of my poster. One thing I would really like to do is change the motivating scenario in both my paper and poster to something easier to explain and more applicable, time allowing. Magda and Julie are on their way to a big conference in France, where Julie will be presenting a demo of Lahar.