First Week of the Semester

This past week — the first of the new semester at NYU — has been filled with things familiar, yet new. I say “familiar” since I’ve already had the opportunity to continue working on projects at the Future Reality Lab for the past year or so. While I took Ken’s graphics class as an undergraduate, prepared for exams and wrote essays for my graduate application, and played more with Chalktalk or my own projects, I found solace in the fact that I could visit the lab and know that I could focus on whatever happened to be important at the moment. It occurs to me that it’s unusual to enter a university program or school year without going through a serious “transition period,” so I am immensely thankful to be a part of the FRL, which, I suppose, has already provided a year-0 of training, or at least a glimpse into what the world of PhD research might entail.

I say “new” because, of course, there are always new people to meet (students, faculty, and so on). Interns are already visiting the lab frequently, and since I’m starting university classes again, I have additional opportunities to interact and collaborate with people. During the various first-year student orientations, I’ve also met students from a variety of backgrounds other than mathematics and computer science–French literature , music history, theater, digitial humanities, and the list goes on. Perhaps this is clichéd to say in some sense, but I think that it’s nice to take a moment to appreciate human-human interaction.