This year, I attended my first SIGCHI conference in Boston. Having recently decided to go to graduate school in Human-Computer Interaction and currently attending Wellesley College, a 30-minute drive from Boston, this was a great opportunity to not only network with the professionals in the industry and academia, but also to see the best of current research in the field. I was able to meet some of the faculty members and graduate students I will be working with at Carnegie Mellon and talk to them about their research and mine. Talking with graduate students during their poster sessions allowed me to see what graduate-level research was like, and to get ideas for my projects. Many of the talks I went to were very interesting and inspiring, and it was great to meet several researchers whose work I had only heard about before.

Computer Science is a relatively small major at Wellesley College. I can now share my experiences at CHI with other students in computing majors and encourage them in their own academic career. More specifically, I hope to bring more Human-Computer Interaction awareness to students in computing majors here and encourage them to think interdisciplinary while working on their own projects. As for myself, I am even more excited about entering the field of HCI, and look forward to graduate school this fall.

Thank you for this opportunity!