By: Lorelei Kelly '08
Pittsburgh, PA
Psychology/Computer Science

I'm not good at making choices. It can take me ten minutes of circling the dining hall to end up with a slice of pizza. Internet purchases involve days of background research and comparison shopping. So when it became clear that I really liked both my psychology and computer science classes here at Grinnell, I knew I was in for a long and indecisive road. I declared a psychology major first, but intended to continue with computer science all along. As I approached the half-way point in my Grinnell career, my anxiety about the future grew. Sure, I didn't have to decide yet, but I would have to decide soon, and that was nearly as bad.

And then something amazing happened. Grinnell hired a new computer science professor specializing in "human-computer interaction", or HCI for short. I thought this sounded promising and so I began investigating. I learned that HCI involves what makes software usable, how people treat computers as interaction partners, and the impact technology has on humans' interactions with each other. It turns out I'd been interested in HCI topics nearly as long as I had been using computers, without knowing it. I had the new professor, Janet Davis, for a class in the fall of my junior year, and we talked about HCI. The more I learned, the more the field seemed perfect for me. But I still faced important decisions. It's a broad field, and I had no idea which direction to take.

Still uncertain at the beginning of spring semester, I saw that Janet Davis would be running a summer research project with an HCI component. I applied, and was accepted. So I spent a wonderful summer working with two other computer science students on our project. The department wanted to create a curriculum centered on the use of programming to create graphic images, but the tools available were extremely frustrating for students to use. Having used them myself, I was eager to find a way to improve the situation. We took a program used in the existing curriculum we knew had a good interface, DrScheme, and developed a way for code written with DrScheme to be processed by an image manipulation program.

Working with large programs written by other people could be frustrating, but each little breakthrough was exciting and very satisfying because I knew I was contributing to the computer science department. In the process, I learned a lot about developing and testing usable software. I knew work at a tech company in the real world would not be quite like spending a summer in Grinnell. Even so, this summer helped me realize this was work I could do well and enjoy. The research experience, and my work as a teaching assistant in the fall, training students on how to use the system I helped create, convinced me to look for a future in software interface development and testing.

Now I'm almost done with my last semester at Grinnell, waiting to hear from masters' programs in human-computer interactions. I'll probably agonize about choosing between schools, and I couldn't be happier about it.