With the passing of another semester comes another life update post. Even though I am no longer a student, being embedded in academia means progress is still measured by semesters.

Recently, I was awarded the Provost’s Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity, which was a really nice capstone on my undergraduate experience. Since I did not walk at graduation, the Honors Convocation was a good opportunity to give my family closure on this chapter of my life.

Throughout these few months, I’ve been busy writing up a storm – one week in April saw 30 pages of manuscripts submitted. My previous post details the accepted poster summary on "Genetic Clustering for Species Identification" and the accepted book chapter on "Evaluating Dynamic Ontologies". There are two more papers in review and preparation right now. One is an expansion of the speciation work for a (hopeful) full-paper presentation. The other details work on taxonomy alignment carried out this semester.

I’ve still been travelling a ton. In December, I headed to Berkeley for my first California Christmas with Dad and Justin and my first non-business trip in 4 months. Three weeks later, I went back to California for a site visit at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Big Data Camp, and the O’Reilly Strata Conference. Strata was amazing – learned a ton, and met some really great people. Definitely planning to go again next year. I was scheduled to go to the Digital Humanities API Workshop but snow delays forced me to cancel, and last minute logistics chagnes made PyCon and ThatCamp SE impossible to attend. These three were certainly disappointments, but after being in an airport every month for 8 months, it was kind of nice to stay rooted for a while. Earlier this week, I visited Princeton University and Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, as part of my work with the Syriac Reference Portal.

On a more personal note, the diaspora of friends has been steadily widening since graduation, including my roommate of 3 years. This has been disturbed, however, by just as many friends changing their plans to either stay in Bloomington or move back. While we will no longer have a single house to hang out in all the time, I’m excited about the social continuity next year.