In Korea, I first majored in computer engineering where I learned both computer science and electronic engineering. In my first year, I learned calculus and natural sciences that formed my fundamental knowledge for computer engineering. As a sophomore, I learned a lot of computer networking knowledge including mobile networking, internet protocol and computer communications. Through these courses, I learned about how computers communicate each other with various technology standards and how these will advance in the future. My courses in basic electronic circuit architecture required me to havea firm understanding of physics and helped me understand computer architecture.

  After two years in Korea, I moved to the U.S. and transfered to the University of Montana majoring Computer Science. After first semester at UM, I got an internship opportunity to work at local company, Adventure-Life. The time I spent with this company was very useful in furthering my knowledge of web programming and software development. At the beginning of my internship, I had a slight knowledge of web programming and how database systems work. At that time I just completed a database management system class and this internship opportunity was great opportunity to apply my knowledge from classroom projects to the real world. Overall, my internship strengthened my PHP, JavaScript, AJAX, CSS and MySql skills. My boss assigned me to many projects and most of them were pretty challenging. I also suggested my ideas and discussed them with my supervisor. Creating new features I’d never tried before was very exciting. One of the benefits from internship was that I could test my programs out with the customers and get their feedback. Rather than knowing many technical skills, I realized that identifying problems exactly and finding solutions through clear communication is the most important thing in real business.

  While interning with Adventure-life, I was also selected to get an undergraduate research award by the Montana NSF(National Science Foundation) EPSCoR. My research focused on discovering feedback causal relationships using Bayesian networks. For this research I extended a previous scoring method and added a new feature for feedback discovery. I worked as a programmer implementing, testing, and evaluating ILVSf (new scoring method for feedback relationships), which requires a knowledge of the C++ programming language and the causal Bayesian networks learning algorithm. Through this project I learned about probability, Bayesian statistics, causal Bayesian networks, how to conduct a scientific project, and how to write a scientific paper.

  I am expecting to graduate May 2009 and currently applying for some graduate schools to extend my knowledge of computer science area. I am actually interested in almost all computer related fields, but hope to study more about artificial intelligence and ubiquitous computing at graduate school.