Hi! My name is Pamela Krolikowski and I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland at College Park (Go Terps!). I'm going into my fifth and final year as an undergraduate student. I plan to graduate in May 2007 with a major in computer science and a minor in philosophy. I am co-chair for the Association for Women in Computing (AWC) in our department and a teaching assistant for the Java Passport Program for high school students.
When I finished high school I had a feeling that I would go into a computing related field because my favorite subjects had been programming and calculus. However, I decided to take a year and explore different majors by taking classes in many different subject areas. Being a Letters & Sciences student or undecided major for a year was a bad decision because it just put me one year behind in the major I really wanted to do... Computer Science. Anyway, my second year of college I became a computer science major and fell deeply into a love hate relationship with the field, which continues today. I hate the times when I stare at the screen for hours simply trying to figure out why my seemingly flawless code cannot pass my professor's evil test data. But I love the moments of pure joy when I realize that the only problem was that I hard-coded the wrong output value. I live for those moments when everything falls into place and just works beautifully and I know that I created it.
So now I have finished four years of college and three of those as a computer science student. In that time my passion for computer science has grown tremendously. One of the things I have become more interested in through my computing career is recruitment for computing fields. Not only are there few women in computer science, but the number of computer science majors in general has dropped at alarming rates. So I am very excited to be working on a Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) project this summer.
This summer we are designing and implementing an introduction to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course for high school students. HCI is another passion of mine. As a computer science major, I consistently get questions from friends, relatives, and people I just met about problems that they are having with their computers. I do the best I can to help them solve their problems, but many times I think that computers could have been designed better to begin with. For this reason, I would like to do further research in HCI so that I can design computers that anyone can use. I realize that this is a lofty goal, but I truly believe that computers should be intuitive to use, not difficult. Therefore, it is my goal to make computers more accessible and useable for everyone!
Well that's enough information about me for now, I'm sure you'll find out more if you read my Journal. I hope you enjoy my site because I am trying to stuff one interesting and exciting summer experience into it! Thanks for visiting!