Comments by Spring 2005 URO Students



Students' Responses to How did the project compare to your expectations? and What did you accomplish and learn from this project?:

"This project taught me more than I expected. The amount of effort put into it was well worth it. I learned about psychology, politics, wind analysis, and team work."

"I learned a lot from planning and running my own experiment. It was more or less what Iexpected. I learned that there is a wealth of knowledge in the grad students and professors around me. When I run into data that I can't understand, I don't have to struggle for days trying to understand it. People are here to help me."

"The project very time consuming compared to my expectations, particularly towards the end. However, it was also very rewarding. My group members and I have learned quite a bit and met many wonderful people. My group has been able to understand more about the politics, psychology, history, culture, engineering, decision making, and daily operations that are associated with both the Golden Gate Bridge and a possible suicide barrier addition. We have completed a technical report, a research poster, a physical model, and will be giving a research presentation on May 12. We have participated in two poster sessions and have been invited to others. We are pursuing further development of our ideas with a possible press conference later in May."

"I learned about cutting-edge graphics technology, I got to apply what I learned from CS184, and I learned a few useful graphics techniques. I wrote a raytracer for ADF data sets. Thus, I learned about ADFs, how they're created, and how to raytrace them (with numerical solving methods). I also learned (and implemented) an octree raytracing algorithm. Lastly, I learned to use OVID and got experience looking up literature and that kind of thing."

"I have worked on this project for a couple of years, so I thought I knew what to expect, but this semester has been particularly fun and rewarding. We achieved a high level of publicity w/ our project and its given me many opportunities to travel and meet interesting folks that I wouldn't have had any other way. This semester we managed to publicize our idea through several outlets, at the local and national level. I learned the importance of being extremeley well prepared and rehearsed for meetings with the media, because anything you say can be written down for everyone to see (so you want to make sure you sound smart!)."

"The project description on the website was different than the one i worked on, so it was different than my expectations. I learned a lot of programming skills.... I also learned how a research lab works."

"I expected to spend more time doing science and less time with mundane technical issues, but in a way that's not unexpected. We assembled an experimental apparatus that we are now getting some data from regarding thick liquid protection layers for fusion reactor chambers. I learned how much of research and experimental work relies on basic mechanical/applied engineering know-how, something which I have from work experience and I think most students don't get from classroom education. So in a way this is rewarding for me to learn that I have such useful skills even here in a top engineering school. But in a way it's frustrating because it is a world apart from my grades and how my competence is measured as an undergraduate. Most of all, though, it really shows me how much potential there is to save experimental time and money with a strong COMBINATION of theoretical AND practical knowledge."

"It was better than I expected. I ended up working on two projects, one being the electronic nose device and the other being a neuroscience-oriented project on odor similarity perception in humans. For the electronic nose device, I built another circuit to run multiple chemical sensors at once. We also tested a breath analyzer application for the electronic nose. The data collected has yet to be anaylzed. Another application for the device is to test its ability to differentiate binary mixtures of odorants. We have yet to run those experiments."

"Like last term, I was more than impressed with how good of an oportunity this has been for me. It has been exciting to work on the same project for a second semester now; I am seeing the project flesh out, and I feel I am learning how to think as a resercher. I have become much more independent with my research this semester. Last semester I spent most of my time learning about truck conspicuity, and forming my hypothesis. This semester I have taken my own idea and designed the experiment, taken the photos, recruited the help (a senior EECS student for the lab software) to explore the validity of my theory. We look forward to seeing our first emperical data in several weeks."

"The project surpassed all my expectations, I've learned a lot about computational materials science and I have even decided to do more research in the area for graduate school. I learned a lot about molecular dynamics and computational materials science. Also I learned about the research process as a whole and built some strong bonds with faculty members."

'This is the third year I've been involved in this project and looking back it has definitely exceeded my expectations. We gathered a lot of data and arrived at promising results. I really enjoyed working on this project. We were able to answer many questions and confirm/proposal several new theories about ASR in concrete. I learned how to perform numerous laboratory techniques and complex concrete matrix analysis. I understood more about the chemical aspects of ASR, as well as, the physical properties."

"The longer I worked as a part of the...research team, the more ownership I took over my duties, and the more interested I became in the project. I expected more direction throughout the project, but the freedom has given me a chance to pursue the research topic in the way that I feel best fit. It has also given me the opportunity to write a formal paper on the aspect of the project in which I see the greatest opportunity. This project has given me a preview of the lifestyle of academia and strong experience in writing a formal research paper. I have learned a little about research techniques, especially putting together past research to jumpstart a current project. The project has also given me invaluable time with a distinguished professor, an opportunity which is diffiuclt to secure at a large research institution like UCB."

"Since I worked on the same project last semester, I was expecting it to be about the same, running tests and working with the equipment. This semester though I found that it was much more productive as far as results go. Since I had worked through a lot of the experimental problems previously I could focus on the actual experiment and getting data that could be applied more pertinently to the research. I was able to use the data that I had gotten from last semester and use it to run experiments that would ultimately help with the quantification of the oxidants produced by zero valent iron. I experimented with different concentrations and types of iron as well as different pH's and oxygen conditions. I felt that I learned a lot about the numerous variables that need to be accounted for when running experiments."

"Initially, the project did not seem to be too challenging, but as we started getting ourselves down to work, we encountered many bumps and hurdles. It required much more time, energy, and emotion that I initially thought it would. I learned much more about real-life engineering and consulting outside sources for help on this project. I also learned much more about the Carquinez Bridge and the different components and politics behind a bridge."

"The project was an extension of what I did in the fall, so I didn't really have any 'expectations' in the sense of the word. It was still highly enjoyable/interesting. I stained MCP joints using Fe Hematoxylin/Safranin O protocols and made EDTA on a regular basis. I am also currently organizing the various analyzed slides into their respective libraries. I will soon be learning to use the microscopes for cell counts in the summer."

"Some of the results of the experiment need further analysis. However, the results we have so far are consistent with what we would expect. I have met my expectations because I have gotten a taste of what it is like to do research. I learned many lack techniques from doing this project. These techniques include cell staining, SDS-PAGE electrophoresis, and Western blot. I learned how important it is to be very careful throughout the experiment because one mistake could mean that the experiment needs to be repeated. I also learned that the first time you do an experiment you seldomly get good results and that there's a lot of repeating of experiments."

"It was more time-consuming, and my project required less 'research'than I expected. (It was more of straight-forward programming than "exploring something new.")

"This was a continuation of an ongoing project. It was basically as I had expected. I learned how various turbomachinery arrangement affects the efficiency and ease of access of the power generation systems in a power plant. And then I applied that knowledge to help me create conceptual sketches of possible turbomachinery arrangement.

"It was as expected, a little more machining than I thought I would do though. I got a better sense of what life will be like when working in the industry."

"My project was to perform a cloning experiment, in which I was supposed to clone a vector into the P. putida. After many attempts, I was unsuccessful. In the beginning, I thought that this project would be simple to do, but then I realized in research, there are so many factors and variables that could go wrong. Overall, I just hoped to gain experience in the laboratory setting outside of class. I learned a lot this semester, and I still have a lot more to learn. I plan to work with XXX in the summmer! From this project and other assignments, I learned to extract DNA from bacteria, making sterile media, how to aseptic streak, ran PCR products on gels, assaying the rate of different proteins, performing digestions, ligations, and transformations. I also used the PCR machine (gradient and the regular) and the spectrometer."

"The project met my expectations. Having familiarized myself with the instrumentation and other project basics, I was ready to delve deeper into the research, and that is exactly what we did. This semester, we developed effective projectiles and are experimenting with new equipment to accurately measure its blunt impact effects. In addition, my original expectations of applying class learning and helping to solve real-life problems while having a good time are still being achieved. We accomplished many things this semester. We built projectiles that achieve our desired results, we are developing instrumentation for quantifying its blunt impact effects, we have better equipment for shooting, etc. In addition, I did hands-on machining and modeled new parts to reflect our continued developments. As such, I am still learning new things as well as applying my engineering knowledge to the research."

"It was really great, the project is very interesting, and the grad student that I worked with is a lot more enthusiastic and helpful than I expected. I also expected to be given a project on the side, but actually I wasn't, which is really good. Although I still can't independently do experiements because I'm not familiar with the equipment yet, but hopefully in the summer I will have my own project and will work independently. I learned a lot of things from this project. I gained skills such as how to culture cells, and split cells. Also how to do a patch clamp experiment on a microfluidic device. I read lots of papers and became more knowledgeable about the field of BioMEMs in general - very fascinating."

"It was a great learning experience, ... and I was able to contribute to the group. I wrote a java program for doing profile profile comparison of protien sub-families to assist in the prediction of related function."

"This semester's work was exactly as expected; I made some progress toward writing a paper on a MEMS-related topic, and also continued the research objectives on from last semester. Everything went as planned. I started work on several different projects this semester; I attempted research into maskless lithography systems, tweaked a LabVIEW-based realtime control system that I had been working on last semester, also did some programming (briefly) in C and Matlab. In other words, my research goals changed a few times over the course of the semester, and I regret not being able to accomplish all of my objectives (only the control system is complete). Even so, I am glad I took the time to gain some extra exposure to the field of next-generation lithography (pun intended) and I've learned a great deal."

"Working in the URO program has met most of my expectations. I wanted to get a sense of the research environment in a university lab setting. After this year of research, I am fairly confident in my desire to pursue graduate work after my undergraduate experience. Together with another student, I implemented some methods to normalize an image's red/green/blue values in order to facilitate the stitching process of panorama generation. I learned several image manipulation algorithms and image normalization techniques. Since these implementations were required to be as fast as possible, I also gained experience in writing efficient code."

"I've been working with Professor XXX for almost a year now and I'm thus quite aware of what we can and cannot do in the area I'm working on (Speech and Handwriting recognition). As always I would have liked to do more, but undergrads are often pressed for time and that unfortunately happened to me. I came up with an evaluation mechanism for comparing various handwriting recognizers and implemented two additional recognizers, one of which did poorly but the second has promising results which I am presently writing up. I am comparing both recognizer to the one developed by Jim Arvo's CIT research project and judging relative performance using a large amount of data."

"The case study of the collapse of WTC turned out to be alot more fascinating than it is dramatic. The expectation was lower than what the result actually turned out. However, due to a busy semester schedule, I don't think this study is complete, and hence, this research will be continued in the coming semesters. Even though this is still a research in progress, some conclusions can already be drawn. One obvious conclusion is the necessity and standardization of structure robustness in major civil buildings such as skyscrapers and bridges. Experience wise, this research is a great accomplishment for me this semester as I learned insights from various professors who are experts in the field of structure robustness design."

"Its an interesting project, which is still underway. Perhaps slightly less direction to the project than may be preferred, but overall a good experience."

"It was way more time consuming and labor intensive than I ever imagined. [I learned] guidleines for a technical paper, teamwork, dealing with busy industry representatives."

"I thought the project was good. It made me think and work. I also had to actually think of some theory and what results it should produce so I knew beforehand if the results were good or bad. The weekly conference meetings were helpful to learn of tasks ahead and clear up any questions I had. I learned a lot about Fortran Compilers and Matlab as well through graphing up various initial conditions. I learned about the energy in coupled oscillators and the effects of various input conditions. I inputed the results in Fortran Code and ran them in a Fortran Compiler. Then I graphed up the results in Matlab. I learned more in-depth the way oscillators behave."

"The work load is fair and somewhat challenging. We try to do different new stuff for project and it is quite enjoyable. The project is becoming more and more interesting because we get to try new things for the project. We try to accomplish new tasks by implementing new formulas into our code and also simulate different situation of oscillators. We made some mistakes but we were able to accomplish most of the task and obtain data needed. We get to know oscillators and fortran code better."

"The research was actually better than what I initially expected from it. I had a chance to deal with the real life projects that IMR has been doing, especially the Smart Parking field test. I learned some analycal skills on surveys through some software such as Microsoft Access. I was able to draw from the survey data some conclusions that make sense to determining whether Smart Parking is a successful field test or not. Later in the summer I will be voluntarily helping out in the focus groups. I look forward to learning a lot from it."

"Expected some mentoring .... Didn't get any. Forced to be independent. So all is fine. Learn to quickly adjust to new project, learn to work independently with minimal supervision. Accomplished in getting... aspect of project from zero to developing at full steam."

"The project was amazing! Learned some new programming tricks, improved my communication skills, reinvented my drive for learning/school, and found out what characteristics of academia and research I need to improve. A tremendous accomplishment was the completion of the psychology project and the formation of a rough draft in the hopes of publication. I created another research poster that I successfully presented at the Undergraduate Research Opportunities poster session as well as an undergraduate research poster session at UCSF. However, the most important aspect of research that I learned form this semester is the importance of community with your PI (principal investigator ­ or - the professor). Working with an amazing graduate student, I usually presented my work, questions, and concerns to him. I discovered that by asking the professor questions and keeping him more in the loop I not only improved my communication skills but I was able to convey all the hard work that I have put in over the semester. The professor is also able to offer unique suggestions and ideas that can expedite the research progress. Fun semester over all, but went to fast!"

"This is my 2nd year in the lab so everything has pretty much settled down and I know what to expect. I am still learning new techniques in lab. Also I got to go to a conference in florida and got to present a poster which was a good experience"

"The project met my expectations. The level of involement and time commitment were as I had expected. The project helped me increase my knowledge of wastewater treatment and testing. I also learned about fundementals that I have not covered in class yet."

"It was interesting and I learned surprisingly quite a bit about other fields, like optics. The computer science part was actually less challenging and in depth as what I expected, but the connection of programming to other fields was deeper and more interesting than I would have guessed."

"I have worked on this project for a few semesters already, so I knew what to expect. We are only now finishing up everything, so I expected that we would spend a lot of our time polishing things up as well as implementing just a few new features. I originally thought that most of this project would be purely implementing functionality, but it equally involved getting the software ready to run on all of the platforms we were aiming to support. Packaging the software so that it was ready for use was quite difficult, but I learned a lot about the process while doing it. I wrote a cross platform graphics system for a logo interpreter. This is a large part of the logo language, so it was a difficult task. I learned a lot about interface design as well and many architectural design decisions intended to increase the performance of this type of software. I did not have much experience with large scale software engineering before this project, so this gave me the chance to design something like this from scratch. There were many times that we were forced to refactor the code and restructure the design in order to make the code easier to maintain as well as more efficient. Although I had experience with multi-thread programming before, I got a lot of practical experience debugging multi-thread code which produces some of the most difficult types of bugs. One of the simple, yet very important things I learned was to make interfaces as simple and useable as possible. Simplicity gives a huge benefit on the implementation side, but it also translates to a better user experience since many of the most irritating bugs are simple interface bugs."

"A great deal of this semester was spent sorting out an appropriate 'next step' and gathering information for that. The move to using support vector machine learning algorithms requires a bit of preparation in gathering both data and positive/negative training sets. Learning about support vector machine learning algorithms was a huge step for me both in the application of my current math abilities as well as the general pattern of learning I've become accustomed to in the lab."

"Since my partner from the fall semester left the team, I was assigned with a new partner. My new partner and I had different background on the research project, there was lots of miscommunication between us....Because of all the confusion, miscommunication and frustration, I felt the team fell apart and everyone started doing their own work without much farther communication between each other. I had expected more mentoring and guiding from the graduate student when he suspected us having difficulties and problems. I also expected that the job for this project was not just on data collecting and data inputing."

"My project exceeded expectations because I learned much more than I expected. However, the project was more difficult than I expected because I had to learn so much. I learned how to design a voltage controlled oscillator. I also learn how to use cadence, do layout, build a circuit using discrete components, and measure the circuit. Finally, I learned the different components of a transceiver."

"This project ended up being harder than I expected. One of the big problems is simply how many bugs you get from making a piece of software with any kind of scale. We thought that we would be able to look at some of the code in how some things were implemented on other platforms, and just copy that. It turned out to be not that straight-forward. I really learned a lot about how to work with other people's code, and incorporating your changes into a larger project. That is something that it isn't really possible to teach in a class."

"Last semester, the code for constructing 3D volume and slicing is mostly done. By the end of this semester, I have changed the project from software acceleration to hardware acceleration, and added new features to the code to enhance both performance and demonstration. I learnt to search for hardware accelerations SDK for different video cards on the market. And I have also learnt different interpolation methods for digital imaging."

"It was exactly what I expected. I learned that coding complex algorithms and debugging them is much time intensive than I previously thought, and to set incremental goals in any project. I understand far better the Shape Context matching algorithm that I learned about last semester."

"My project moved a little slower than I expected, but was still really great. Because we worked on our own project without any supervision from a graduate student, a lot of the work was self-propelled and based off of trial and error. I definitely have learned a lot. The overall project is still in its preliminary steps. This semester we were able to get things started with the pressure sensors finally soldered together. We designed better projectiles and plan to build more to be tested in the field this summer."

"I expected the same results as last semester, but have learned so much more than last Fall. I learned the art of teamwork and working with deadlines. The ability to stay focused on our goal and work towards that goal. How to prepare oral presentations and written reports."