Sarah E. Smith
DMP Summer 2003

Welcome to my DMP website for the Summer of 2003.

I was very honored to have been chosen to participate in the Computer Research Association's Distributed Mentors Program. I'm a Senior at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC and I'm working with Dr. Laurie Williams.

Dr. Williams recommended that I apply for this program last spring when she was my advisor on an independent research project. We requested to work together for the summer. I have already decided to go to Graduate School, but this program has allowed me to glimpse what Graduate School is like. I want to continue studying Software Engineering, and when I officially start Graduate School (fall of 2004) I hope to have Dr. Williams as my advisor.

I feel that this program has helped me learn about both academics and industry. I spent two days a week working at Nortel where I was able to learn about how industry works. The rest of the week I spent at State working on writing tutorials and researching items for Nortel. I also worked with a total 6 software programs that were new to me and I had to pick up a short period of time. I also got to program some in more diverse environments. I was able to use Perl and Java to write programs that people are actually going to use!

I also had the exciting opportunity to attend the Agile Development Conference as a student volunteer. That was a truly wonderful experience where I was able to meet lots of interesting people from around the world and learn new ideas about the emerging Agile movement. This was also the first ADC that was ever held so I was able to be part of something new!

But the best part of this summer was the people. I got to work with, of course, Dr. Williams, who truly inspires and awes me. I don't know how she does it all. I also worked with Lynn, Dr. Williams' other DMP participant. She's a wonderful outgoing person who helped me break a bit further out of my shell. All of the people in the Software Engineering group are awesome to work with as well: Mark, Dright, Lucas, Hema, Neha, Michael, Prashant, and Nachi. I also can't forget Colin from the Graphics group. The people at Nortel were wonderful as well. I learned so much from Jason and Julie down in the lab. Steve, an intern at Nortel thought the InRoads program, is an awesome guy, even if he does go to UNC-Chapel Hill. Todd is a great manager for that team even if he does put people on the spot in the meetings. And the rest of the guys upstairs were awesome, too!