Parmita's Blog

I just met one of my artistic idols! I’ve been following Katherine Tsai aka http://chuwenjie.tumblr.com/ for a more than a couple years now and I have always admired her art. Especially the way she does gorgeous lighting effects and the way she uses color. I recently found out that she also goes to CMU! And I was lucky enough to meet her right before she graduates and goes off to LA for her job at Dreamworks . She was super sweet and told me fun stories about her times at CMU and an intern at Cartoon Network. She also drew and signed this little card for me! (which I will treasure forever! <3 ) I think it’s amazing that through this stroke of serendipity I happened to meet her. I’m so happy and grateful to have had that opportunity. And who knows? Maybe I’ll meet her again in California!?

I got one of my comics published in Carnegie Mellon's school newspaper--The Tartan! I'm super excited and hopefully, there's more to come :) Though it's also fun posting it online and getting anonymous feedback from thousands of people, having a real, physical print copy of my work is a whole nother feeling. It feels good to have other people--people who I can really see and talk to--validate my work. 

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been over a month since I came to Carnegie Mellon University. It’s been a pretty wild ride--I barely know where to start! Coming all the way across the country to Pittsburgh means I’ve got a whole lot of new places to explore! Here’s map of some of the places I’ve gone to so far (marked with hearts <3 ): Cathedral of Learning: The Cathedral of Learning (lovingly called ‘Cathy’ by those who know her :) ) is a huge cathedral a short walk away from CMU. It has 42 floors and the public can access all the way up to the 36th floor. A bunch of friends and I took a late night trip to the 36th floor so we could look down at CMU. After walking all throughout the CMU campus for the past month, it was super interesting to see it from a bird's-eye view. Carnegie Music Hall: I went with a couple of friends from SCS to see the Dean of SCS, Andrew Moore interview the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. The building was absolutel...

I'm super proud to say that my Kickstart Project has been funded!!!!!! A few months ago I decided to use my 3D printing skills to create a personalized 3D printed photo tag. At my graduation party, I made a personalized tag for each of my guests as a return gift. It was a big hit! Everybody loved having their very own tag. So I decided to turn this into a Kickstarter project to share it with even more people. You can check out it and watch the video here:  kickstarter.com/projects/1957628432/personalized-photo-tag . It has just been funded, so I'm super excited to get started on creating the tags for everyone and shipping them out!

Just came back from a trip to Google Pittsburgh! For the past few years, Carnegie Mellon has taken the incoming class for the School of Computer Science to a trip to Google Pittsburgh. Pretty fitting, considering the Dean of the School of Computer Science, Andrew Moore, was also behind creating the Google engineering office in Pittsburgh. It was truly an inspiring experience. On top of the fact that the campus is so lively and fun, it was amazing to hear from actual CMU alumni--people who had been in exactly my shoes a few years ago--talk about their experiences and accomplishments at Google. One of the major things that really struck me was how committed everyone was to making an impact and making a difference. Most of the time, when you think of Google, you think of the search engine, or maybe Google Calendar or Google Drive. On top of these obviously useful products, Google also spends a massive amount of resources into improving the world through outreach programs. A pr...

I'm super proud of these gifs that I made for my friend's birthday. I learned a whole lot of new Photoshop techniques in order to create them and I had a lot of fun! I'm proud of all my improvement and the new art I've been able to create :)

I had a really fun time visiting San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) last week with my friends! One of my favorite pieces there was the piece by Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance. I thought it was really neat that he was inspired by randomness and he even used a random system of color selection in order to make sure that when creating these pieces he wasn't guided by his own subconscious guideline for a certain composition.  That got me thinking about randomness in cs and so I created a little project for generating random grids like the piece above.  I started off with a small Python script using the built-in Turtle graphics library to animate this: But then I decided it would be best to optimize it as a web page using JavaScript instead so it'd be easier to access and view. I also added a button to keep generating new random grids.  You try it out yourself here:  parmita52.github.io/Spectrum-by-Ch...

Just came back from the amazing event hosted by Nutanix, a data center infrastructure and cloud computing software company.   It was extremely engaging as we started off with a design workshop and competition (My team and I won 2nd place!) We also had an extremely informative speaker panel of women who work at Nutanix which opened my eyes to how varied jobs in the tech industry truly are. Not everyone is a software engineer or coder--people do all sorts of jobs in all segments of a tech company, and it was interesting to see how all the differing roles meshed and interworked to create a whole company. I was also lucky enough to get to talk to the CEO Dheeraj Pandey of Nutanix, and he gave some excellent advice about staying motivated and always looking forward. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to attend.

Today I had the awesome experience of getting a tour of the Video Game Dev company, Zynga! It was really fun and engaging. First, we got to play a bunch of arcade and video games (of course!), but after that, I got to see an amazing presentation by Kasey McKenna, a senior software engineer at Zynga. She explained her problem-solving process for a part of the Zynga game, Farmville: Tropic Escape. The task was to animate a boat making a delivery, making sure that it hit certain key points on the way there. With simple code, the boat made sharp, jerky motions, awkwardly arriving at its destination. However, after working through the problem, Kasey applied calculus and parametric curves to simulate the natural smooth curving of the boat’s path.   It was super interesting to see the calculus I learn in school applied in real-life in someone’s actual job! And here's what the finished result looks like: Overall, it was a lot of fun and definitely an e...

I'm super proud to say that since September of last year, I've been working with a team of 4 other girls in the Technovation Challenge --a global competition where teams of girls work together to create an app that helps work towards one of the UN Global Goals .  Our team, team superCode, created Amity, and app working towards the goal of Peace.  From our submission, which you can view here : "Amity serves to bridge the physical and cultural distance between people across the world. Read other users’ stories by clicking a country on the globe, and share your own experiences, from personal anecdotes, to photos and videos, to recipes. Like and bookmark your favorite posts to easily view them later. In creating a platform for people everywhere to view different cultures, Amity hopes to promote a feeling of friendship, or amity, among people of all cultures." Out of thousands of worldwide competitors-- we made it to semi-finals!!!! Though we didn't ...

I'm a pretty visual learner, so over the course of my AP Statistics class, I've made a couple of drawings that really helped me solidify certain concepts in my head. I'm pretty proud of them, and hope others will find them useful as well!

I had a lot of fun at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire. Especially since I’ll be going off to the east coast for college next year, I really wanted to make sure that I attended this one before I leave. It’s practically been a tradition now in my family, started back when my dad took me to the very first one in 2006 when I was only 6 years old. I love going to the Maker Faire every year because I always learn something new and get to see something amazing and interesting. Whether it be a new way of 3D printing which only costs $99, to different ways to grow food, to trying out new foods. Overall, it was a lot of fun and being only 20 feet away from Adam Savage is now definitely a highlight in my life: I feel even more motivated now to create projects over summer!

Just attended Lynbrook’s first ever Hackathon, VikeHacks. And won first place! It was a lot of fun and I worked with one of my best friends, Marilyn to create “Destress,” an app to help you relax and unwind. Our main goal was to create a lot of different features so that we’d learn something new with every feature we created.   Breathing: My favorite feature is the “Breathing” one, where we created a catalog of various breathing exercises to help calm you down. We learned about different types of layouts and ways to implement gifs in Android studio. Feelings: Since the Hackathon was sponsored by IBM’s Bluemix Watson project, we wanted to try and use the Speech-to-Text and Tonal Analysis processes provided by them in our “Feelings” portion of the app. We wanted the allow the user to say something and have the app save a tone, or emotion for that statement. Then, if the app is used regularly, over time the user could see how their tone has changed. ...