Spring 2010 Update

I survived my second semester of graduate school! And, I still want to go back next year! I think this is a good sign that something is going right. It has been a busy semester, so here is an update of all the stuff that I have done.

PECI 2010

I was on the committee that put on the first Power and Energy Conference at Illinois (PECI) in February 2010! It was a relatively small conference, especially since it was the first time putting on the conference, but it turned out well and we are starting to plan for next year's event as well. This is also where I got my first publication on photovoltaic module configurations. Not a “big time” conference, but, hey, a publication is still a publication.

(photo by Stanton Cady)

Illinois Half-Marathon

Encouraged by some of my marathon-runner lab mates I decided to sign up for the Illinois half-marathon. I trained pretty consistently, and was able to run the whole 13.1 miles without walking at a 9:34 min/mile pace. My final time was 2:05:18, which was a lot better than I initially expected. I also made a shirt on Cafe Press. PV researchers represent! I even got a snazzy metal for finishing the half-marathon. I'm hoping to do it next year too!

UOCD at Illinois v1.0

This year was the first time that User Oriented Collaborative Design (UOCD), originally an Olin course, was offered at University of Illinois. Since I was the only person at Illinois that had ever taken UOCD, I offered to be the teaching assistant for this first iteration of the course, which was co-taught with Olin. Due to the courses newness and poor scheduled time, we only had one team of four students; but let me make sure to mention that these were four awesome students that rocked UOCD. It was a bit bumpy at first, but all four students stuck with it and really "got it" by the end. I learned a whole lot more about UOCD too, particularly that when I took the class our team made a lot more mistakes than I realized. So, it was a good learning experience for everyone. I even made the class a cake for their final presentation. The colored rectangles are supposed to be index cards since we used so many of them throughout the semester. Let's just say I'm still working on my cake decorating skills...

EAPSI in Korea

Last semester I applied to the East Asian Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) program. This program is awesome (but you do have to be a US citizen in a US graduate program). You find someone to host you in one of the listed East Asian/Pacific countries, submit a research proposal, and if you get the award, they pay for your flight there, give you some money, and a living stipend. It is a sweet deal if you ask me. So, I'll be in Korea for two months over the summer doing research on power electronics and PVs at Seoul National University! I can't wait.

Until I leave for Korea in mid-June, I'll be hanging out at the lab, doing research, trying to brush up on my Korean, and probably playing a little L4D2. Looking forward to a great summer!