About Me

Mercedes R. Lopez
http://.cs.duke.edu/~mrl19

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About Me

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Summer 2007 Internship at Duke University\About Me

sponsored by

Computing Research Association Distributed Mentor Project (CRA-W DMP)

ABOUT ME

Mercedes I'm an undergraduate student of Engineering at University of California San Diego. Although I am technically a senior, it will still be a few years before I graduate (Spring 2009), after which I plan to continue learning in graduate school. My interests are quite varied and somewhat unrelated to each other, so honing in on a specific area of study has proven to be quite challenging.

Some very recent series of tragic events have produced the positive side-effect of helping me clarify and even identify some of my life, academic, and career goals. I currently find myself potentially pursuing a direction that I had not previously considered. I'm thinking abnout conducting my graduate school studies (Ph.D.) in the field of cognitive science with some sort of emphasis on either technology in K-12 education or even environmental architecture. As I explore my options more at depth, and as these thoughts crystallize, I'll be better able to formulate the adequate words to describe my future direction.

Just in case you're interested, here's an overview of Cognitive Science, extrapolated from the UCSD Cognitive Department website (http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/index.php?cat=undergrads&page=pros_ug):

Cognitive Science brings together methods and discoveries from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy and computer science and includes three broad categories:

Brain - the understanding of neurobiological anatomy, processes, and cognitive phenomena (I'm particularly interested in the body's cell memory)

Behavior - the cognitive activity of individuals and their interaction with each other and their sociocultural environment, including the use of language, information, and media; and the experimental methods and findings from the study of psychology, language, and the sociocultural environment.

Computation - the cognitive activity of individuals and their interaction with each other and their sociocultural environment, including the use of language, information, and media. This area also interests me.