My name is Mai Bui, class of 2024. This is where I document and reflect on my journey in the Computer Science iDesign course taught by Professor Audrey St John. Besides making, creating all magic items and learning about electricities, and coding, through each video, this is where I felt my soul baby was taken care of and embraced. I hope you will enjoy my journey with me here.
During the woodworking workshop, Kris made it so comfortable to learn, be curious and be amazed to be in the lab. So, I felt a strong sense of belongingness in the world of woodworking. That gave me a great impression of wood that I just wanted to keep coming back and creating amazing things with it, which is why I keep persisted to make my final project – breathing tree by wood.
Give feedback to your peers for their elevator pitches felt like gifting someone: I put more thoughts and concerns in what they would feel when open the box. What works great for me is straightforward ideas to move forward but keep the neutral tone to not add extra feelings affected the views of product itself. I think it is a tricky task that I want to do it carefully but it also gives me so much joy if this can help them just the same way their feedbacks help me.
In academic journey, there have been many assumptions about my ability to succeed as I thought of myself as a “___ person”. Like the flower pot in this class, I thought I was not a design person, my flower pot was assumed not to succeed in terms of visualization. Or in my First Year Seminar, I was always insecure about my English writing as it was not made for a STEM person like me. I was very nervous about my midterm essays and I did not believe I could succeed with it. But my professor met, complicated my outline and confirmed that my writing was not bad.
Not only I had assumption about myself, I also made mistakes of making assumption about someone else. When I was a sophomore, my main concern was my classes and my 2-credits research. I realized a friend in Linear Algebra was so struggling and I assumed they was not a “Math person”. But, it turned out that they were a senior, busy with graduate school application, their Physics and also wanted to graduate 1 year sooner than expected. Everybody had their own stories, concerns and priority, I was so quick to judge somebody just based on a small aspect of their life that I could see and my current experience.
However, sometimes with right intention, we still could hurt or make others feel like they did not belong. When I was in UMass Algorithm class, we had a Friday lab session where we was given 5 problems and discussed with a group to figure those questions out. In the first day, I could barely understand the questions while there was a sophomore in the group quickly understood and offered the answer. Then, when I asked him what that question meant, I felt judgement and even though he helped me, I felt I was so separated and not belonged to the group or even to the class.
It was not the only case that I felt that way. I also did that to the others as well. When I was in my Neuroscience research, it was a Computer Science project for 4 of us: 3 of them were Neuro-CS double major and I was the only one with CS major. So, I had more time than all of them and had more time to work with the coding parts. When we tried to meet and code together for 1hr, it was not efficient as it was the same Jupiter Notebook and usually you could not finish coding anything in 1hr. There were about 2 times that I finished the task by myself, sent them, explained to them and submitted to the professor. Accidentally, I was creating an intense competitive environment where they felt like they were all losing a game. Then, I could not communicate to them anymore and seek help from my PI – Neuroscience professor. He advised me to be honest to them and said he did not mind if we sent things a bit late but wanted us to be together worked as a team. I sent a message to apologize and I needed their help to move forward. Then, we collaborated smoothly and became good friends with each other. I also learned my lesson to notice my teams’ feelings and knew when I should step back to leave room for them to shine. It turned out to move fast, it was not me doing everything fast but it was spreading out the work and let everybody work in their best field.
On the day we practiced about fishbowl activity as an observer and participant, I had a chance to learn that perspective-taking can boost my cognitive flexibility and impact my sense of belonging.
When I was an observer, I noticed more how each of the team members listened, reacted and supported each other about the ideas. Sometimes, the idea came really close to the new pivot – like the piano with the pressure sensor or so far away like the adjusting light with distance sensor. I realized just by having their teammates listen and support their ideas made them more comfortable to suggest new idea, even sometimes was to throw away their established plan. There was a clear difference with teams with good care and provider of sense of belonging and teams that do not. Moreover, just by being silent and taking a step back, listen to other people brought so many new ideas for me and so many lessons for how to support my teammates.
This is also the first time I learned about CPX but thanks to taking small steps, my background of coding and the encouragement from professor, my friends and TA made it so much easier and more belonged. Brainstorming with my teammates make me realize that to grow well as a group meaning make sure everyone feel good, validated and comfortable with the ideas that we are going after. My teammate and I had different coding background. This seemed to be her first Computer Science course and this is my last semester as a Computer Science major. While I felt comfortable and excited with the idea of using the pivot, she felt a bit nervous that we could not finish those ideas on time. So, we tried to actively listen to each other’s ideas, support those that seemed comfortable for both of us, settled down ample time to make both feel realistic and doable. And most important, there were multiple times we threw away ideas that no longer served us. We had ideas together, wrote codes together, design together while kept on checking and reflecting. Thanks to that, when we actually executed the project, we moved really quickly and felt both validated and connected after the project.
However, there are many times things do not go great as planned, for example my thesis right now. I planned my thesis since the early of March this year about predicting force information for surgical robotics. Then, I went to a conference in June to see that a representative from Intuitive Surgical announcing they already had force feedback implemented in newest version of commercial surgical robot.
And the lab I visited in Nashville also did the pretty the same method that I used to solve that problem was so far ahead of us. I felt like I was just like playing catch up but it took so long for me to let it go. I decided to continue working on side project and took a step away from it for a while. I realized that this thesis topic did not suit my current skills, not what I was most interested about and not fit to any lab that I wanted to do in graduate schools.
Three days ago, I finally gained enough to talk to my Principal Investigator to change my thesis completely. With the new idea, I felt so much more fit and interesting to pursue. This was only given by taking time to stop helped me to look at it from a different view. Even though I had four more months to complete it and was supposed to submit the background, introduction and method earlier this month, I felt so much more relieved. When I talked with my professor, she gave me her insights and endless support, validation for my thought process. She brainstormed with me and supported my new idea. She made me feel like I belonged to the lab and the field. To be honest, I am not sure if I can make it on time or not but thanks to this belongingness and perspective-taking, I can continue moving forward.