Dr. Barakat gave us a talk last Thursday on her projects and a little bit about her PhD journey. The projects she worked with are really really interesting and so much complicated. As my mentor, I already knew a little bit about what she did, but the talk gave more depth about what she actually did and how. Seeing the length of her PhD scared me, the content even more- but it’s nothing, I’m still pursuing my plan of going to graduate school and doing research.

We also went to the University of Iowa to give a presentation about our different projects, and I can say that I am very proud of our cohort. All the presentations, preparations, reviews with our mentors and everyone at VRAC paid off. Huge thank you to them, they are dedicated to our growth and learning experience. We were so confident when explaining and showing that we actually know and understand what we are doing, even if it’s still in progress. Meeting the interns over there was also cool, especially their work on health and computation.