Harun’s Midpoint Reflection
General Reflection
Coordinating the program up to this point has been a very rewarding experience. The students are making considerable progress and demonstrate their progress with every activity and presentation. I feel quite fortunate to have this cohort of young scholars and graduate fellows this year.
Coordinating Experiences
Task Management
Making sure that things are logistically running through the program definitely required me to set up a system that I could rely on for effectively managing all of my tasks. I’ve been using an app called todoist to manage the various sorts of tasks that are required of me to complete throughout DSPG. These have included things such as:
- Date Reminders and Lists for Scheduling Guest Speakers
- Recurring Tasks for Updating Schedules, Blog Posts, and other Assignments
- One-off Tasks Focused on Helping the Three Project Tasks
- Outlining Tasks Related to Program Finances and Administration.
Having a system for being able to categorize and set up dates, priorities, and labels for my tasks has been great for staying on top of the administrative tasks.
Management Systems
While a systematic list of all the tasks has been helpful, executing these also required me to come up with repeatable processes.
Blog System (Quarto)
Having everything consolidated into one place helped to give students a single landing page for work related to the program. In the previous years, the schedule would be a word document on the CyBox, the schedule for talks was tabulated in an excel sheet, and other pieces of information scattered through various systems and directories. Only needing to update a single location for informing students and project advisors who are not always with the group is both efficient and saves a lot of time.
GitHub Repositories, Templates, and Classrooms
In the interest of having students work on assignments with a mix of datasets, code, and documentation, I’ve constructed all assignments to be GitHub Templates that can be reused for assignment creation in GitHub Classrooms. This has made collecting the work of students significantly easier and has the added bonus of being available for future DSPG programs since they are template repositories. People talk about reproducable code, but reproducible assignments are really where its at!
Learning Objectives
DSPG is first and foremost a learning experience so I’m also finding a lot of areas to develop my skills and explore during my time in the program.
Coding & Technological
With one of the projects focusing on Machine Learning and AI through the use of High Performance Computing (HPC), I’ve also gotten the opportunity to work with the HPC systems to get an understanding of how they work and how to execute tasks on them. The HPC has forced me to be more friendly with the Command Line Interface which I’ve been using more as a way to understand program execution on computers.
I’ve also gotten some more experience working with loading up and operationalizing LLMs, but I hope to learn more as the program continues and as the Housing & AI team makes more progress.
GitHub Actions
Along with gaining more experience on the CLI, I’ve also been working with GitHub Actions as a way to automate the tasks that GitHub Classrooms and GitHub Repository Templates have not been able to help with.
This process removes a lot of the tedious work that comes with having to sync repositories and render them only to have a post updated for a typo and therefore forcing the whole cycle all over again (trust me, this is lived experience talking).
This gets very time consuming even for twelve students.
Program Development
I won’t go into the specifics of them all here but I’m trying my best to document my rationale behind implementing some of the newer components of DSPG, like the student group activities. The ultimate goal is to have this all in some kind of handbook which serves to better situate the purpose and design of the DSPG program. Definitely a Work-In-Progress now, but hoping that as I get more free time, I am able to contribute further to it.
Things Time Won’t Allow Me
In my introductory blog post, I meantioned that I was also interested in learning more about statistical modelling. Unfortunately, I’ve not made any significant progress in this area due to how much the logistical components of DSPG consume my time.
I look forward to keeping it in my list for future learning.