The wide variety of majors available at UC Santa Barbara gives every student a chance to study whatever it is they are most interested in. This study can be applied by performing research and other activities that enhance the learning process. It is important, however, that students are able to balance experimenting and learning when to move on.

Being a second year Computer Engineering student, I knew that my interests for a variety of fields were in development. When I talked to my digital design professor about his research, I found out that he does research on improved drug delivery systems. In other words, his team was trying to target cancer cells and attack them directly instead of destroying other healthy cells in the process of treating the bad ones. This, to me, seemed like an incredible opportunity. A chance to apply my Electrical Engineering and Computer Science background to something more than computers. But I also learned the variety of research that goes in under his lab, and this really motivated me to be involved as I saw myself being able to explore different opportunities.

So, when I first started my Gorman Scholar internship, I started by researching how proteins interact with osmolytes under different conditions. I first learned how to use programs such as VMD, which is used to build the protein structure, and NAMD which performs the simulations. After working on these programs and reading research papers I found myself not being very productive. Knowing myself, I knew this was because my interest in the subject has dulled. After spending two weeks, I decided that it was more beneficial and more appropriate for my future to work on different project. That is when I first learned about the Two-Photon Microscopy that my lab works to build in collaboration with other departments.

This device will be unique in such that they want to enhance it with a wireless technology that is able to conduct real life experiments. And my part will be to help write a code that is able to process and reconstruct an image from the data flowing from the device. So, for the past week I have been experimenting with CUDA programming. This is an NVidia technology that uses the computer’s graphics card instead of the CPU to execute the code. It has been really interesting and an interactive process, and I hope to accomplish something by the end of these next 5 weeks.

I had kept thinking that I wasted time, and that I didn’t learn anything. But I was wrong. By spending time doing something I didn’t like I was able to learn something about myself. I was also able to make a constructive decision at a critical time which I felt took a lot out of me to do. Either way, my advice for anyone reading this post, pretty much the only thing I recommend you take out of this is to Experiment, try something new, but know when to move on and that will come with practice.