Experience I&II
UHP Discover
My first honors experience was participating in the honors college's UHP Discover program, which consisted of doing undergraduate research under a mentor. The program lasted the entire summer, so the number of hours caused it to count for two expereiences. I aided in research regarding British imperialism and the usage of immigration in the 1880s, with a specific focus on Australia, which is shown in the picture provided. The first two months I annotated dozens of physical documents, and flagged topics important to the overall project. The last month I worked on finding online documents. Over the course of the summer, I kept a spreadsheet documenting each material, both online and printed, and kept up to date what each consisted of that was important.
Participating in this project helped me research into the modern implications of racism and slavery/indentured servitude, as well as analyze patterns of whiteness and who applied compared to today. Building on that, I can especially appreciate the varied layers of how the idea of race has evolved I also gained greater archival skills and networking.
In the future, my mentor and I plan on hopefully participating in a conference either domestic or abroad. The skills I gained also can possibly be utilized for a master’s thesis, if I decide to go down that route.
Experience III
Portfolio Website
My third experience was also my longest. This project originally was slated to take a few months, but as I contniued to take on new responsibilities, this project fell to the wayside. Although I was excited to make progress, the lack of rigid deadlines made it very easy to put off the work for "another day". Most of the work I completed was done in bursts, and I want to continue to improve it. I spent a large amount of my time focusing on the Udemy courses I purchased, and finished off with creating this website itself. This included learning skills I did not necessary include in the website at this time, which included JaaScript/TypeScript which increases the dynamicness of what I can do, and React/Vue which is a better structure system than the simple one I used. Another chunk of time was purely dedicated to figuring out how to set up the custom URL, and various other backend things that allow this site to stand.
My website is not yet finished. I will be adding more information to what is already here, filling out present sections, and making the site generally more versatile and enthralling. I know I am capable of making the website much better, it is just a matter of sitting down and making the time for it. I want to include JavaScript as I learned in my Udemy courses, and make it more dynamic.
In the future, I will be continuing to update my portfolio website, and will be continuing to improve it. I have many ideas I still want to test out. I hope to include more features such as parallax scrolling and animations as I gain more knowledge in web development. I also plan to continue to utilize this website post-graduation as it will serve not only as my honors website, but as my portfolio. As a computer science student, the website itself serves as an opportunity to show what I can accomplish. If I want to showcase what I can do, I need the showcase itself to stand out, too.
Experience IV
Women's Growing in Leadership
My third experience was a bit different than the others. I was selected to participate in the Warren Bennis Leadership Institute's research program, Women's Growing in Leadership. This was designed to see how giving leadership mentorship to women can help empower them.
This project consisted of three parts. The first was attending the initial retreat WBLI hosted for the program. This was the cornerstone of my learnings and I still refer to the booklet of lessons we were given when I need them. It not only focused on leadership principles, but also how women specifically navigate in the corporate hierarchy.
The second part was the semester long project based upon the retreat. We worked with a mentor who guided my small group of fellow women in designing and implementing a project. Our project revolved around increasing information available to low-income high students, to show them that college can be an option for them if they want. We hosted this information on a website, and we created a presentation so that if any future groups would like to expand upon the idea, we created the framework for it.
The third part was supplementing my learnings with additional book resources. I ended up primarily reading the One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. I think about it every single time I give an update to someone—can they read this in one minute? If not, it should have either been broken into pieces, or it necessitates a deeper discussion. I already feel that my skill in concisely explaining my progress is dramatically better than in the Fall. Additionally, I read a bit of Introduction to Leadership by Peter Northouse. The part I read seemed to be a deeper dialogue into "what makes a leader", and how older notions of natural leaders may not be the best way to look at it.
I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to participate in this program, and to be able to make an honors experience out of it. I got more out of the experience than I could have expected, and I am eager to continue putting these learnings into practice. Academically, professionally, and personally, I can see using these learnings. I've noticed this sort of thing is very cyclical—you help others to help yourself, and vice versa. By taking the time to better myself, I am able to turn around and help better others. From here, I want to continue to learn about this topic. I've grown to realize that I really like interacting with and guiding teams, so I want to take advantage of the time I have at UC to continue to foster that interest. I'd also love to participate in programs like this one if I come across anything similar.