Lara Schenck

Artist, programmer, researcher

Updates and Think-Alouds

On this page, I haphazardly record updates and free-write to help my thinking. After some time goes by and the page gets long, I copy everything here into an “Updates” post. To see what I’m up to in less detail, read my Now page.

March 30, 2023

A BIG THING: I was selected for the NSF graduate research fellowship!! Big deal!!! My application for that was one of not-too-many things in my life where I can 100% say that I tried my very, absolute best and couldn’t have done anything more to it. So yeah, feeling great about this.

March 24, 2023

Submitted my first journal article! Amazing! If I can figure out how to prioritize it, maybe I’ll write up a hasty blog post with some of the content. We’ll see. Also, I probably won’t hear back for at least 3-4 months about a verdict on the submission, and it is very likely that it will be “revise and re-submit,” which is a sort-of rejection. There’s also a chance the article is out of scope for the journal, but hopefully, that’s not the case. There’s also a chance it will be accepted with revisions, but that is highly unlikely, to my knowledge. Time will tell! In any event, it’s a huge accomplishment, and I learned a ton in the process.

March 17, 2023

Okay, still working hard on my journal article…and it’s “done” but I have a few not-too-cognitively challenging things to finish up. I will share one preview, which is an image I am feeling GREAT about right now, but that I will likely question at some point in the future:

Image with a stick figure thinking "maybe I could turn my HTML skills into a career", the figure is looking towards a road and there are gates along the road with people sitting on them. The image is titled "How 'Real' Programming Is Gatekeeping That Restricts Career Growth in Computing of Adults Who Follow Non-Traditional Pathways"

Yes, this is what all of that “is CSS a programming language” has amounted to! Hard to believe it.

March 9, 2023

Omigosh working so hard on my journal article. Learning some lessons about writing, and learning to de-prioritize class assignments when compared to research. Keeping up with Nepali classes. The other day I wrote a small and sloppy node.js script to replace some text with a regular expression, and I did miss my previous software developer life for a moment. I really loved coding/programming/developing whatever you want to call it.

Otherwise, all is well!

January 29, 2023

Holy moly is it really almost February? I have been totally neglecting keeping my website up to date in my usual ways… and that’s just fine because I just have to prioritize, you know?

I granted myself permission not to write a 2022 Year in Review/Whatever post…but then I started writing it, you know, just to do it. I wanted to share some photos but they are all in .HEIC format and so huge and my usual imagemagick command wasn’t working. Then, I made breakfast and started thinking about why am I writing this darn post anyway…I’m not into it, and I honestly feel uncomfortable putting pictures and personal information publicly online nowadays. This is a switch, and likely because I’ve been reading about all of the many ethical issues with AI and tech companies, and I’m picturing what ChatGPT will know about be based on my blog posts. So, all that said, I think 2021 was the last year of year in review posts, and maybe 2022 was the last year I’ll share personal details beyond musings in these updates. Sad.

October 31, 2022

Holy moly is it really almost November? I have been totally neglecting keeping my website up to date in my usual ways. In hindsight it maybe wasn’t a great idea to change up the site structure so much right before a big life change, but oh well!

So, what’s been going on? Well, I am almost through my first semester of the Human-Centered Computing PhD at Georgia Tech and it’s awesome. It’s hard for sure, and it definitely took a couple of months to adjust to so much change, and I’ve had continuing problems with insomnia, but overall, I am so excited at how things are going. It’s everything I wanted it to be.

I’ve also been continuing my Nepali classes in a bit of a start/stop fashion, but I’ve been doing it! I started to meet with a different teacher using the platform italki, and I am very lucky to have found a very talented teacher who makes the classes really fun. We leave for Nepal in one month, again, holy moly!

Today I will do the first session of a curriculum I designed about job finding and professional networking for the DataWorks team. The modules I added are as follows:

  • Career visioning, your strengths, and your story (today)
  • Informational interviewing and meeting people online
  • Resumes, interviews, and dealing with rejection
  • Practice interviews

It will be four weeks long. This is an initial version that we will improve upon to run again sometime next year. I’m not entirely sure what the research questions are here yet, but it’s not necessary to know at this point. With this kind of research, the questions and the research direction often emerge after the project during data analysis. It really seems like research can be whatever you want it to be; it is certainly much broader than designing controlled experiments.

August 16, 2022

Just published an update!

Previous Updates

These are collections of updates and think-alouds from the past!