WAVES 2021 Closing Celebration

Well, here we are again. Another excellent WAVES workshop in the rear view mirror! I’ve had a great few months working with all our participants and mentors — tracking your progress on hands-on software development work and seeing you all at our check-in meetings and enrichment seminars.

We got together for a (virtual) celebration this morning to toast everyone’s hard work & achievement over the course of the workshop. We invited participants and mentors to submit gifs or memes that they felt represented their WAVES experience ahead of time. I threw them in a slide show and had everyone give a thirty second-ish explanation of their image & say anything else they wanted to to the group — followed, of course, by a hearty round of poetry-slam style snaps!

A (sadly, incomplete) workshop group photo.

Here’s a recap of what folks had to share about their experience!

🔗 Abby

Abby writes,

I think this represents how I feel about remote work these days. It is what you make of it – so might as well make it fun.

🔗 Acacia

Acacia writes,

Okay alright okay hold on mentees we will put something up on the trello board soon oh god it’s gone already okay

🔗 Aria

Aria writes,

This summer I wrote a lot of test cases, it was more fun when they passed.

🔗 Austin

Austin writes,

Thankfully I worked with two awesome mentees, and together we always managed to solve the problem! :^)

🔗 Ben

Ben writes,

I wasn’t directly working on Empirical, but that’s a job well done right there.

🔗 Dave

Dave writes,

its really hard to pick one image [about JavaScript shenanigans]

🔗 Diane

Diane mentioned WAVES being an excellent two-way transfer of knowledge.

🔗 Jamie

Jamie writes,

Like this lizard I was on a computer and hunting bugs, also I just like the slow wave

🔗 Lanea

Lanea writes,

I’m referring to one instance in particular, but it was a summer-long ongoing struggle.

🔗 Matthew

Bringing enthusiastic new developers into your code base makes you realize how much dust & cruft has piled up!

🔗 Mitchell

Mitchell writes,

The four different stages I cycled through writing C++ and wrapping my head around MABE and Empirical.

🔗 Tiffany

Tiffany references the infamous error code for missing web pages XwX

🔗 Yemi

Yemi’s contribution models an excellent growth mindset!

🔗 Thank You!

Thank you to all of our participants and mentors – you were great to work with this summer! Big kudos also to our PI’s: Dr. Rob Pennock and Dr. Charles Ofria.