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aboutme.html
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<html>
<head>
<title>About Me</title>
<script src="jquery.js"></script>
<script src="includeMenu.js"></script>
<link rel="image_src" href="images/domain.gif" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/facebook icon.png" />
<meta property="og:title" content="About Me" />
<meta property="og:image" content="images/domain.gif" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Lizzie Paquette" />
<meta property="og:type" content="stuff about me"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="This is who I am" />
<meta charset="utf8" />
<style>
div.par {
background-color: white;
color: rgb(54,88,153);
margin: 20px 0 20px 0;
padding: 10px;
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<body style="margin-top: 60px; height: 1500px; background-color: rgb(233,235,238) ;color: rgb(29,33,41); font-family: Helvetica,Arial, sans-serif">
<div id="menu"></div>
<span style = "background-color: rgb(59,89,152); color: white">
<h2><b>Kind of looks like facebook right?</b></h2>
</span>
<h3> Eventually this piece of writing will be shortened down to a curt 500 word personal statement for grad school. I’m putting it up now though, in case you want to know more about how I ended up in this state.
</h3>
<h1>Please, let me explain… </h1>
<div class="par">
<p>
I have a bit of a nontraditional resume. Two bachelor’s degrees with four majors, what could I be thinking? And why wouldn’t I just get a Masters???? I know, I know. I have reasons for these choices I swear.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
First, a bit about my background. I grew up poor, my mother an immigrant from Peru and proud small business owner, my father a carpenter. Neither of them had gone to college and there was always fear of not making ends meet. Indeed, sometimes they didn’t. I want to make this clear because ultimately most of my choices revolved around money. I did however, have idealistic dreams - I’d be an academic, tirelessly searching for hidden truths. Little did I know how much trouble I’d have deciding which truths to look for.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
I started Wesleyan on the right foot and obtained a research position almost immediately. It was in something I was very interested in – neuroscience. After all how can you expect to understand anything if you don’t understand yourself. I poured my soul into that lab and the research I did there. By the end of the year I, a wee freshman, was taking over a senior’s project and was literally doing brain surgery on the reg!! As the years progressed I got an apprentice, and eventually a small team. Janice Naegele, my PI, was absolutely invaluable to me as I developed into a scientist, a thinker, and a person. I still thank her today for the trust she put in me and the freedom she gave me to explore my own ideas.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
However by the end of junior year I was getting a little antsy. You see throughout the time I was also majoring in (pure) math. But math differs from neuroscience in that it takes time to get anywhere close to being able to talk about research. Not only is there a layer a jargon, but there’s a way of thinking and dissecting that needs to be developed. My professors would refer to it as mathematical maturity. Around this time I had done an independent study with a professor (Thank you Matthew Gelvin for guiding me through the world of p-adic numbers!) and I was hungry for more. So I made the hard decision to not work in the lab that summer and instead do an REU in knot and number theory at Louisiana State University. My project, “p-adic methods for computing belyi functions,” was a nice extension on my previous p-adic numbers work, but left me at a loss. I honestly really struggled during this summer. I would stay until 9pm with my partner, combing over our mathematica code, try to ask questions that would illuminate some of the theory behind this computational engine we had built, but I just didn’t get it. I felt dumb and incapable and like math was surely not for someone like me.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
I know now that that summer was so hard for me because I wasn’t properly prepared. I hadn’t taken complex analysis or topology and wasn’t fully mathematically mature. I was thrown into a realm of math almost entirely out of my grasp and I survived. Even better, I decided that wouldn’t be the end of it. When I got back to Wesleyan for senior fall I asked my professor, Chris Rasmussen, if he would be so kind as to help me understand the underpinnings of what I had done over the summer. If I recall correctly, I was even so bold as to say, “I’m going to understand what I did, I’m going to fix our broken code, and I’m going to publish a paper on it!.”
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
That would be the start to my senior thesis, which would surprise everyone by being in math instead of neuroscience. I took a lot for me to leave the lab, but here are some justifications. As I learned skills in the lab I would pass them on to others. By the end of my run I had taught nearly everyone in the lab how to perfuse a mouse, a fancy way of killing that involves open heart surgery and preserves the brain. This is made it so that I was never the only person to know a certain skill. I was valuable but not indispensable. Secondly, most of my time was spent on image analysis. I would sit there for hours counting possible synapses and marking them on photoshop. I had this sneaking suspicion that a computer must be able to do this and I promised myself that once I knew enough computer science I would go back and write that program to do my job. It turns out that once I left they bought a $10,000 piece of software that can do essentially that. You see, I wasn’t that hard to replace.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
My senior thesis morphed as we realized to I couldn’t truly understand beyli functions until I had a solid basis in algebraic geometry. I was in my second graduate level class in Algebra, so I was prepared for that, but geometry was another story. We adjusted our goals and settled on this task: a proof of Bezout’s Theorem, a statement about the multiplicities of intersections of curves in the projective plane. It was hard. I had to wrap my head around things like two parallel lines intersecting at infinity and the hyperplane. But Rasmussen was kind and incredibly patient. The proof was to be performed in an hour long talk with a grueling question period after. I did it with only a small hiccup and many of my friends and family around.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
At this point you might be going heyyyy, aren’t you applying for grad school in computer science? Didn’t you say 2 degrees and 4 majors??
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
Well while all this was happening, a parallel narrative was brewing. I call it the one where the TA falls in love ;)
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
I took my first computer science class sophomore spring. It’s required for the math major, but I had been avoiding for as long as possible because I had a bad honors Java experience in high school. Dan Licata was my professor and would ultimately become one of my favorite people. I was pleasantly surprised by the class, which even had some proofs! And thought I had probably done okay. I wasn’t expecting it when Dan asked if I would be willing to TA the course next semester. I hesitantly agreed and soon found passion in telling people exactly where they missed a semicolon. Dan was teaching comp sci 2, a functional programming class, next semester but surprised me again when he asked if I would follow him, having not even fully completed comp sci 2 myself. I told him I didn’t know if I would be good at it but he reassured me I would be fine. If I thought comp sci 1 was cool, comp sci 2 was 10x better. Functional programming is my life blood. If you don’t believe me read these two sentences again. Get it!? Recursion is fundamental in functional programming. I ended up TAing comp sci 2 for 3 more semesters until I graduated. Somewhere along there the joke of, “Oh I’m not a computer science major I just do this for fun,” got old and I squeezed the entire major into 3 semesters. I was a real life Hermoine Granger, taking classes that literally met at the same time to make it work. Big thanks to the computer science department and Professor Danny Krizanc for letting me take his classes in a non-canonical fashion.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
So by the end of my senior year it wasn’t like I was not impassioned, I just liked everything too much. How could I decide on just one? Some were saying I should put them all together – computational neuroscience or neuro-inspired computation. So I said I’d give it a try, and even wrote a lovely facebook status on how this would be simply perfect. The thread that ties my interests together into a neat bundle.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
But how?
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
Well I wasn’t ready to apply for a PhD, I didn’t even know if I’d like it! A Masters would be the right choice. There was only one problem, masters degrees cost money, a lot of money. At Wesleyan I was on full financial aid, and paid only $4,000 per year with food and housing included. However, that amount was a serious struggle, and the thought of forgoing getting a job to go even more in debt left me with too much guilt to tackle. There had to be another way. I found it in the combined plan program. The combined plan program is a dual degree program where Columbia University partners with schools like Wesleyan to give students the opportunity to get the best of two worlds: small liberal arts and big engineering. Students attend their home institution for 3 years and then Columbia Fu School of Engineering for 2, earning a BA in their original major and a BS in engineering in the process. And the best part was that I would receive undergraduate financial aid! I would be non-traditional, attending after 4 years instead of after 3, but that would be nothing new.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
Engineering wasn’t my first choice, but I thought it would be good for me. I wanted to try taking my theoretical knowledge and apply it. Maybe I would even like it. I figured I could take grad classes while I was there and simulate a masters. It would be a productive two year gap year where I would figure out exactly what I was went to do with my life.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
Through a lucky connection, I started my engineering experience off strong with a research internship at Carnegie Mellon, the summer after my senior year. I worked with Professor Diana Marculescu on a project that was originally focused on neuromorphic architecture, a subset of the neuro inspired computation category. When I got there, we realized I knew far too little about artificial intelligence and neural networks to truly be of use, but I found my place on another project.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
[project details here]
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
I had a lovely time while at CMU and found Diana to be truly inspirational. She was the first tenured female professor in the entire CSE department. I was so anxious about trying something new and she made it accessible and exciting. She even let me write all my code in SML, a functional language that surely no one there will use again.
I thought Columbia would be a similar success.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
Boy was I wrong.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
“Columbia sucksss,” is a text I’ve sent more than once when people ask me about my new life. It’s quite the change from Wesleyan, where I had invested teachers and knew nearly everyone. I was shocked by how lonely it felt, both socially and academically. My class notes, something I had taken meticulously and relied heavily on at Wesleyan, weren’t even my ‘friends’ here. They knew nothing more about how to do my homework than I did. The truth was I had screwed myself. I was overconfident, I skipped a lot of prerequisites and overloaded on classes. I was in two graduate level biomedical engineering classes and upset I didn’t understand the terminology when I was in my first semester of computer engineering. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and while I kept muttering to myself about how I should be in grad school already, it doesn’t mean that I should be able to excel in any graduate class anywhere with no preparation.
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
One good thing did come from me going to Columbia though – research! [will talk more about research when I feel like it]
</p> </div>
<div class="par"> <p>
I’m getting better and getting knocked down and the subsequent getting up.
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