Final Report
Before this summer, I had not made any deliberate attempts at learning about human-computer interaction work in the realm of computer science. At a previous workplace, I had read small bits of The Design of Everyday Things, and I had taken a cognitive science computer science course at CU.
Over the course of the summer, I started and completed The Georgia Tech HCI I edX course. Overall, I found the course to be a very satisfying introduction to HCI fundamentals. I made sure to do extra readings from the course and that exposed me to a great deal of HCI material that has been published and introduced me to the ACM SIGCHI special interest group where a large amount of HCI papers have been published. Between the additional readings from the HCI course and looking at HCI papers published for CU at CSRankings, I gained an incredible amount of appreciated for the HCI field. This got me into a regular pattern of reading 5-15 page academic papers and I think I have a good basis for discussing with a professor with an HCI background an approach to doing a literature review master’s thesis on HCI topics.
I can appreciate that HCI topics can be broadly applied to many different subfields within CS and that focusing on human-centered design can result in deeply-loved design patterns. I appreciate this field’s approach compared to the current AI/ML craze because where AI/ML research can be greatly limited by things like access to GPU hardware or gigantic datasets. HCI approaches can be tried at the small scale (making an educated guess design decision), or large-scale (large human studies). The participant, predictor, and processor models used by HCI practitioners were new concepts for me, and I learned them from the course along with a large number of design principles and heuristics.
My original project proposal also included investigating CU labs, faculty, and staff for resources available to do research in educational technology and HCI. Research did yield a large number of labs at CU, but I didn’t find significant interest after reaching out. Some of this was underestimating how unavailable normal campus resources are over the summer and that many faculty and staff take significant time off and also attend conferences over the summer. While I got a few responses that my resume would be reviewed, most of this work is going to be done in the Fall to attempt new follow-ups. I pivoted to spending more time reviewing what graduate school options I have at CU and to start work on preparing for Summer 2024 internship interviews. That led to me picking up the popular Cracking the Coding Interview book, reading more papers to decide which faculty members to contact to be a potential master’s thesis advisor. While I didn’t find a lab to contribute to over the summer, I’m happy with my pivot as it’s led me to decide to pursue graduate school after my CU post-baccalaureate is finished.
I’m happy that CSPB students can enroll in a 1-credit professional development course because it really helps with being accountable for personal growth. It’s very easy to think you’ll do something for your professional career, but not execute and I believe this course helps that process along.