• Starting Off
• Reading and Writing
• Collaborations
• Adjusting
• Imposter Syndrome (or, the Easy and the Hard)

Starting Off

The second week of my REU started off quite normally. Dr. Caspi had some clinics to attend at the beginning of the week, so I was continuing my research while waiting to meet with her. I had found some research leads the previous week that I wanted to chase down.

Reading and Writing

One of the leads I decided to follow was to try to adapt the social-ecological model of health I had learned about in public health my sophomore year to examine the issue of transportation equity. While equitable access to transportation, rather than health, would be the focus, I figured that the lessons in thinking about how systems interact to influence an outcome were pretty applicable.

From there, I dove deeper into gaps in previous research by researching transportation equity and navigation in rural areas and inside buildings.

I was worried that applying the social-ecological model to transportation equity might be too unconventional to be worthy of pursuing, but after meeting with Dr. Caspi, she agreed that it was promising and noted that I could use it to come up with more built environment features and evaluation criteria for the attributes table currently on hand from previous reserach.

The rest of the week, I continued diving into applying the social-ecological model to transportation equity. I began a write-up and found I was much slower writing than I was reading. I suppose that is generally true for formal write-ups…

Meanwhile, I also had the opportunity to converse by email with a couple of my mentors outside of UW (my advisor at UNC Chapel Hill – Dr. Gary Bishop – and a retired professor introduced to me by Dr. Richard Ladner during the Tapia Conference last September, Dr. Bryant York). I noted to Dr. Bishop that I often think of his words that “interfaces themselves are languages,” as I find myself now always thinking about what is communicated by design choices in graphical interfaces, data schemas, the physical environment, or software. He replied that “Everything is a message, often unintended. Clothing, cars, houses they are all messages.” (He also noted a bit more about visiting an architecture school, but I’ll need to check with him before quoting the rest of it here. Perhaps you’ll see the rest of it next week!) Dr. York shared about community-based participatory research with me and, in the course of the conversation, I gained insights about the danger of over-aggregation of data in identifying where inequity persists. Both conversations highlighted how factors interconnect and reverberate in impact, and such conversations strengthened my resolve and passion to conduct research thoughtfully and with examination of factors some may overlook.

Collaborations

Spending so much time on outdoor standards reminded me of the indoor standards Luminary is focusing on back at Chapel Hill and the ADA accessibility audit taking place there after a ton of advocacy by disabled and non-disabled friends and more in the past year. I was introduced to UNC facilities services in the past couple of months and we worked out an informal data collaboration. I realized that I would need to reach out again soon to determine what data standards and/or software they are planning to use for the audit and to make suggestions before they start. I did also learn that outside of work related to my REU, both Dr. Caspi and I have an involvement in defining schemas for indoors! I told her about working with facilities, and she said we can explore the research part more in-depth later in the summer, after focusing first on the current tasks at hand.

Adjusting

Adapting to an 8 to 5 schedule is an adjustment for many used to school schedules; I seemed fine with it my first year at SAS, then struggled noticeably with micro-timing (subtracting any minute I spent getting up for water, using the restroom, resting my head, etc.) and burn-out my second year, and spent my first week trying to combat that, as it absolutely exhausting to “complete” the 8 hours when brains need brief breaks too. I continued combatting it this week by giving myself time to walk around and/or to briefly talk about research to someone else, just as it would go if I were in-person (I’m currently virtual until July.)

Monday happened to be the day that I had trouble logging into Scopus, logging into the housing portal for July and August, and resetting my password. (A normal day with its own ups and downs!) Some people seem to think that computer science students are immune to such computer troubles, but in reality, we simply know enough to know when such situations are out of our control!

Imposter Syndrome (or, the Easy and the Hard)

After spending a couple days planning my path for the next few weeks, researching, and starting my more formal exposition of the application of the social-ecological framework to transport equity (with special emphasis on transportation), I realized that a lot of what I am doing at the moment could be considered public health or data science. This startled me back to some thoughts I’ve had in the past year.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not a real computer scientist because so much of what I do (not just HCI, but public health and more) goes outside of what is traditionally thought of as computer science. But that is not fair to the (other) HCI and people out there who I think are computer scientists. (It might also be noted that accessibility work is not necessarily a subset of HCI work, though HCI is integral to accessibility. Hence I objectively don’t consider myself to be a pure-HCI researcher.)

The general attitude of people seems to be that things that begin to touch social sciences, like HCI, are easier. Perhaps the reasoning for this is because things like accessible design and art require less obscure specialized language and knowledge of foreign mathematical concepts than, say, trying many techniques to prove an algorithm or trying to discover a gene tied to cancer. Yet what makes it “easy” is also what makes it so hard: people are wonderfully complex, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem perhaps suggests that it is impossible to create a system (out of the elements of nature given to us by our Creator) that is provably equivalent to our method of computation. (Although one could argue that both our minds and our methods for modelling it are incomplete in power, one additional issue, besides our lack of complete understanding of our own minds, is self-reference. Can we reason about ourselves inside ourselves?..don’t read into the last two sentences too closely though, I haven’t been very exact with terms here.) Yet another issue is that that our minds are unique in nature in interfacing with souls. This means, then, that while we can model trends in the interactions between a human and a computer (or a human and art), we can’t simply take a Cartesian product, if you will, of the possible actions of a human with the enumerated actions we create on a screen.

And so one thing that has sometimes pushed me away from HCI, even as I dove deeper and deeper and grew a passion for it and for accessibility in the past few years, was because it felt unscientific. I knew I should ignore people’s stereotypes, but I wondered if I, the young person I was who had just discovered a passion for computer science her freshman year of college and wasn’t particularly smart, was really doing “actual” computer science and not “just” applications. My advisor and the HCI professor in the department and everyone else were real computer scientists doing “hard” computer science, as far as I was concerned, but not me. Additionally, despite being used to finding direction in uncertainty through a variety of research projects and advocacy efforts, I admit I was also unsettled by the extra uncertainty of the field: I could implement accessibility features and attempt to make it visually pleasing, but what is a “correct” interface, when there are so many possibilities for access? Such a line, I think, is a much wider gray zone than the gray zones inherent in characterizing a “correct proof” (a sufficiently complete and consistent proof might be better terms) or a treatment for cancer (are some symptoms alleviated in a statistically significant amount of test subjects? This is without discussing the philosophy behind statistical significance, of course…). Thus what makes HCI and the social sciences “easy” is the very thing that makes it difficult.

As I move forward and continue to grow my passion for researching in accessibility, including all the HCI involved in it, I remember some things my dad and a different computer science professor at my school said to me regarding imposter syndrome.

My dad says that maybe my unique niche is bridging the gaps (something I agree with), and that maybe I could spawn a new area of computer science! I wouldn’t go that far, but having been involved in bringing computing to public health, more awareness of medicine to computer science, analytics to accessibility concerns, research opportunities to a community college before I graduated, and more, I am a firm believer in making connections and bridging not just the intellectual gaps, but also bridging the other gaps: the gaps of isolation I have sometimes felt as disabled Filipino-American woman doing accessibility research in tech in the South, the similar gaps that make it harder for other people (“similar” to me or no) to jump across, the gaps of discouragement and lack of opportunity that are so often forgotten, unseen. And I also firmly believe that God has put me here for a reason. (Especially as I never would have pictured myself here growing up, yet for all my plans otherwise, I’m here; and I count myself super blessed that I’ve gotten to learn from and/or collaborate with so many truly amazing people from many different backgrounds to help make an impact together larger than I could have had by myself somewhere else.)

The computer science professor, Dr. Don Porter, also came to computer science research late and felt imposter syndrome, he told me one day when I wandered by his office thinking about a “computer sciencey” thesis statement for my research (which he is not involved in but that I have told him about), stressing that I felt like my work or that I wasn’t “sciencey” enough, and saying that I sometimes feel so dumb. He put his advice from the experience (and from his life experience) bluntly: (Note: I’m paraphrasing here since it was a conversation that took place a few months back.)

“Do you really think that HCI research is less computer-sciencey than algorithms? You don’t think that the research of our HCI professor is any less than that of our algorithms professor, do you?” he asked.

Eyes wide, I shook my head vehemently no.

He continued, “You’re doing a lot of good work and you know, there will always be people who are smarter. But what you should focus on is your purpose. Taking the example of your project, is your purpose to simply dip your toes in research and try to write a paper, which are both good goals, or is your purpose to make an app that will benefit people in an area of need?” The latter, I thought but didn’t say as I waited for him to go on:

“And if your purpose is to better society, then, excuse my language, f*** what other people think.”

I nodded; I would have to repeat his (and my dad’s) words to myself time and again, but in that moment, I understood: Own it and focus on what matters, not what other people think about smartness or greatness.