At the end of a semester there is that precious moment where you sigh relax and think "wow I am so glad that is all over". It's a moment to reflect on the positives and negatives of the past few months of frantic effort and try to find peace with your own shortcomings. It's much easier to look at your grades for a term if you've already made peace with yourself about how much effort you put towards each class.
This semester, as most has been busy for me. I was approved to work 27 hours as an undergraduate (normally limited to 20) so that one of the research groups I work with could pay me for work I was already going to do. I took five classes, two general education classes and three major/minor related ones. Geology 101 was Geology 101. The class was simple, lots of material I already knew, and the professor did not expect us all to be experts in "rocking" out. Church History was a classic example of what is wrong with BYU religion classes (for more details just ask me, I'm not supposed to rant, but I can if needed). My text processing class was not the most exciting thing in the world but I learned a little perl and that was nice.
My two favorite classes were my graduate class in natural language processing and a class for my major on Semantics and Pragmatics. Both were challenging and pushed me to understand complex subjects. My NLP class was an exhaustive overview of current and past research into everything anyone had done with language and computers. We discussed text analysis, voice analysis, speech recognition, morphology, syntax, different tool sets. For the class we had to complete a project for the semester and I chose to kill three birds with one stone (maybe four, if I'm lucky). This semester I spent dozens of hours working on an application that will allow the recognition and generation of Elicited Imitation test items. Basically I wrote a program that will assist us in analyzing sentences for specific syntactic, lexical, and morphological characteristics. This semester I presented at a conference in Hawaii (Second Language Research Forum, aka SLRF) some research my colleague and I (Meghan Eckerson) had done analyzing the impact of 40 different sentence level features on students performance in an oral profficiency examination. Because of the conference and the enourmous effort expended to analyze our current 152 items by hand I decided that we needed an automated analysis process.
Anyway, I could go on, but this blog isn't about my research it's about Megan and Ross! (If you are interested in reading more about what I research http://psst.byu.edu or http://nlsoar.byu.edu).
My other favorite class, Semantics and Pragmatics was great because it was a ton of reading but no busy work. Every day in class was important and every article we read helped us gain a better understanding of the field. For that class we had a research paper and I wrote about Politeness Theory in Film. I annotated and analyzed the content of the movie Second Hand Lions. It was a lot of fun and I learned a ton. The final was hard and my hand did not recover till the following day... Hand written essays are not nice to my fingers. Dr. Nuckolls (a new professor) taught the class and I think she did a fabulous job.
Megan has been an incredible support throughout this whole semester, she has been my sound board and my companion through the rocky parts. I became very very ill after my Hawaii trip and the Doctor actually ordered me to not go to school or work for a week. It was a very trying time but Megan was right there with me through it all. Everything I have done this semester would not have been possible without the support of my Wife. Go Megan!
That about wraps up everything that has happened to me this last semester. Next semester I will be submitting some work for publishing as well as presenting research at two more conferences, one as a co-Author and another as the Primary Author. Oh, and taking some classes too; mainly GEs as I am trying to wrap things up. I take the GRE this summer and hope to start Grad school in about a year and a half. Want to get a Masters in Computational Linguistics.
Final thoughts: Blogging is an interesting medium because I am torn between giving generic somewhat blase descriptions of what is going on in my life and vibrant rhetoric about the idiosyncracies of my life. For those of you who know me I'm not a very bland person, I am extremely passionate about pretty much everything, and trying to write something that can be read by everyone (IE parents, friends, random strangers, co-workers etc) is a trying experience. I will do my best to find balance.
This semester, as most has been busy for me. I was approved to work 27 hours as an undergraduate (normally limited to 20) so that one of the research groups I work with could pay me for work I was already going to do. I took five classes, two general education classes and three major/minor related ones. Geology 101 was Geology 101. The class was simple, lots of material I already knew, and the professor did not expect us all to be experts in "rocking" out. Church History was a classic example of what is wrong with BYU religion classes (for more details just ask me, I'm not supposed to rant, but I can if needed). My text processing class was not the most exciting thing in the world but I learned a little perl and that was nice.
My two favorite classes were my graduate class in natural language processing and a class for my major on Semantics and Pragmatics. Both were challenging and pushed me to understand complex subjects. My NLP class was an exhaustive overview of current and past research into everything anyone had done with language and computers. We discussed text analysis, voice analysis, speech recognition, morphology, syntax, different tool sets. For the class we had to complete a project for the semester and I chose to kill three birds with one stone (maybe four, if I'm lucky). This semester I spent dozens of hours working on an application that will allow the recognition and generation of Elicited Imitation test items. Basically I wrote a program that will assist us in analyzing sentences for specific syntactic, lexical, and morphological characteristics. This semester I presented at a conference in Hawaii (Second Language Research Forum, aka SLRF) some research my colleague and I (Meghan Eckerson) had done analyzing the impact of 40 different sentence level features on students performance in an oral profficiency examination. Because of the conference and the enourmous effort expended to analyze our current 152 items by hand I decided that we needed an automated analysis process.
Anyway, I could go on, but this blog isn't about my research it's about Megan and Ross! (If you are interested in reading more about what I research http://psst.byu.edu or http://nlsoar.byu.edu).
My other favorite class, Semantics and Pragmatics was great because it was a ton of reading but no busy work. Every day in class was important and every article we read helped us gain a better understanding of the field. For that class we had a research paper and I wrote about Politeness Theory in Film. I annotated and analyzed the content of the movie Second Hand Lions. It was a lot of fun and I learned a ton. The final was hard and my hand did not recover till the following day... Hand written essays are not nice to my fingers. Dr. Nuckolls (a new professor) taught the class and I think she did a fabulous job.
Megan has been an incredible support throughout this whole semester, she has been my sound board and my companion through the rocky parts. I became very very ill after my Hawaii trip and the Doctor actually ordered me to not go to school or work for a week. It was a very trying time but Megan was right there with me through it all. Everything I have done this semester would not have been possible without the support of my Wife. Go Megan!
That about wraps up everything that has happened to me this last semester. Next semester I will be submitting some work for publishing as well as presenting research at two more conferences, one as a co-Author and another as the Primary Author. Oh, and taking some classes too; mainly GEs as I am trying to wrap things up. I take the GRE this summer and hope to start Grad school in about a year and a half. Want to get a Masters in Computational Linguistics.
Final thoughts: Blogging is an interesting medium because I am torn between giving generic somewhat blase descriptions of what is going on in my life and vibrant rhetoric about the idiosyncracies of my life. For those of you who know me I'm not a very bland person, I am extremely passionate about pretty much everything, and trying to write something that can be read by everyone (IE parents, friends, random strangers, co-workers etc) is a trying experience. I will do my best to find balance.
1 comment:
As usual, you are prolific and passionate! Keep up the great work in life and learning!
MOM
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