Ian Ballard
I’m a sophomore at Duke. I went
to Foxboro High School in Foboro, MA but I currently live on the island of
Nantucket, also in Ma. I enjoy
biking, reading (Pynchon, Eggers, and David Foster Wallace being my favorites),
and landscaping. I’m deciding on
majoring in mathematics, neuroscience, or English. Currently, I am taking computational topology, a course that
aims to integrate computer science and mathematics, emotions and the brain, a
neuroscience course, and for fun, contemporary American writers and yoga.
I first began using a computer to play jezzball, chips
challenge, and freddy fish on my mom’s windows 95. Since then I have used computers primarily for word processing,
music, and the Web. Most of my computers
have been PCs, but I bought a Mac for college. My first experience programming was with Matlab. I am working in a neuroscience
laboratory and over the summer they told me to learn Matlab. So, although I have programmed before,
my skills are limited to what I could learn doing tutorials. My most difficult programming
experience was while learning Matlab.
I was trying to make a program that would produce a few boxes, but
instead I got an infinite series of zeros that crashed my computer over and
over. I have not yet had a formal programming
project except the pancake problem, which was incredibly frustrating because as
soon as I had finally found the pattern I needed, I had to figure out how to
program it. My interest in
computer science comes from several sources. First, I need to learn Matlab for the work I am currently
doing, and learning to program, even in Java, will be helpful with that. Secondly, if I go into either mathematics
or neuroscience, I will need to create computer models on a regular basis. Thirdly, the structured and logical
type of thinking involved in computer science seems interesting and rewarding
to me, and I am excited to expand my problem solving abilities. While I am sure there are some
fascinating problems in advanced computer science, I am interested in it more
as a tool to other disciplines and see computer scientists as useful members of
interdisciplinary research teams.
Their daily work, I imagine, involves transferring abstract real world
problems into the language of computers.