last day of the conference!

times does fly! yesterday, i presented my research and it went over really well. a lot of people were interested in my stuff. i think i definitely need to do some reading into more nonlinear dynamic theory though. i had one guy who told me the way my state space was defined wasn't correct. i'm not exactly sure why, but fortunately, my advisor doesn't agree with the guy. either way i'm going to redo the analysis another way just to see if i get the same answer. today all the robotics folks presented. people brought in their robots for demos, and the one pictured to the left was one developed by the folks at delft university. i talked to one guy today who was using a model similar to something i started experimenting with at the end of the term. his model looks like it might be good to use for some stuff i want to do for my phd, and he had a few suggestions for how what he was doing might be used for what i wanted to do. in the workshop today, they had us build our own robots. we were divided into 20 teams of 5 people each. my team came in 3rd or 4th overall, which was pretty cool. we got the little guy to walk almost the entire length of the table, which was impressive given that we had 45 minutes to put everything together and get the weights balanced in such a way that the robot would actually walk. the picture below shows my team holding tryouts.

last night we had dinner at the hotel and then a small bunch of us sat around talking until midnight or so. it was mostly a group of students, a couple of whom i actually went to undergrad with, who are all in the same lab at the university of michigan. its really neat to sit around with a bunch of folks and have conversations which will jump between random subjects as they did last night. we switched from tv shows to walking to marriage proposals (there were some good ones). the other fun thing about this group (or maybe just engineering groups in general) is that i'm in the minority here--this time because i'm a woman. for some reason i feel more comfortable being in the minority. go figure. one of the other women at the conference also did her undergrad at mit. i asked her if she went to grad school right after undergrad. she said yes, but i took 8 years off in the middle to play blackjack professionally for the mit blackjack team. i think that's an awesome reason to take 8 years off of school. i approve (not that my approval matters).

this conference has allowed me to think about a lot of things both professionally and personally. one of the personal things it was making me think about though was living in europe. i think it would be fun to come live here somewhere for a year or a few after i finish my phd. there's a lot going on here related to what i do, which is great, and would, hopefully, enable me to find a job/postdoc relevant to what i'm doing. obviously i have a few more years before i even have to worry about this, but i guess its good to be that excited about what i'm doing!