My father received his MBA from Duke, and before that he graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (India's MIT). My mother got her Ph.D. from Northwestern. My sister went to Princeton, UT Medical School, and started her residency in neuroscience at Penn last year. My friends in the Classes of 2010, 2011, and 2012 were going by the bucketload to schools like Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton.

It’s incredible what you can make with just Xcode and an idea (sorry Android people, I have my loyalties). I recently sat down with Dr. Paul Toprac to talk about the new Mobile Computing Certificate coming to UT and I’m so excited to see the projects that will result from it. Check out the news article that came from my interview!

Like most of the freshmen in their first few weeks of classes at UT, I decided that going to the career fair to scramble to get an internship was a good idea. Obviously, the earlier I could start panicking about the future, the better.

I didn’t get hired by Google or Facebook right then and there, but whatever. There was still time for the summer to work itself out. In March, I went to San Diego for a conference that I was invited to by one of the recruiters I’d met this year called Qualcomm Women’s Collegiate Conference.

As computer scientists, the way that we impact society seems pretty clearly laid out. We write code, and the result is new ways for people to communicate, learn, organize data, or even drive cars. Last week, however, Doug Wolfe, who is the head of operations for Facebook’s Atlas advertising platform here in Austin, came to speak to Dr. Nandakumar’s Elements of Computing in Society class with a different message. He explained that innovation is about more than just computer scientists’ skill set. It includes an entire mindset as well.

"Don't be a professional minority, be a professional who happens to be a minority." - Richard Tapia

It turns out that controlling a $100 helicopter using only your hands and a LeapMotion controller is pretty difficult.

I just finished an article for the department's news page about a really cool CS workshop at an elementary school hosted by a Lecturer Alison Norman and some UTCS undergrad students. I hope you'll check it out and be inspired to find ways to bring CS to the next generation of students.

Hi mom and the 71 other people who I recently found out read my blog (we just started tracking our audience numbers, so exciting!).

I've been learning about UT's efforts to bring high school girls into our department these past few weeks. Read my news article about a summer camp we offer called First Bytes! You can even apply to work at the camp.

T minus 55 days and counting...until the the summer break begins. Of course as members of the UTCS community we actually have finals and hence I have included those days for your convenience.

Last week, during Spring Break, I started watching The Office. I had always wanted to watch it, and so when I found out that Netflix had the entire show (and the British version), I started and figured I’d watch an episode or two.

I started on Sunday. By Friday, instead of the ten or so episodes I thought I would have watched, I was halfway through season 7.