CSIE at Cedars Sinai 2024-2025

All I did last summer after work was sit in my apartment. That is, until one day I heard my roommate crying on the phone in the other room. She sobbed that she almost never saw her friends or went out anymore—not because she didn’t want to, but because she was afraid of spending money, even though she was living below her means. Just a few years out of college, she was already feeling the trudge and sludge of working life. And that scared me.

This summer felt like my final "trial run" of adult life before I settle into it for real after graduation. (Well, unless I go to grad school, but let’s not think about that yet.) So despite living farther from work and having longer hours than last summer, I vowed to make this one more meaningful. I ate lunch in the park across the street instead of at my desk. I visited touristy spots around the city just because I could. I tracked down the accessible pianos at UCLA and practiced them. I made plans with old friends when I made it home on weekends.

Work-life balance isn’t something that comes from a certain kind of job. It’s something you carve out for yourself, especially in a city as full of life as LA.

This summer marked my first time working closely with software engineers. Up until now, I’d mostly worked with mechanical engineers, where our collaboration was straightforward—I’d give them board dimensions and connector placements, and we were done. Software, though, is a different beast.

Firmware wasn’t just a tool to get the hardware working anymore—it was a product interface. I had to tailor it to the needs of the software team: strip it down to just the functions they needed, refactor it for readability, and even walk them through how to run it on the physical hardware. It was more collaboration than I was used to, and it forced me to look at my own code differently. Instead of writing quick, scrappy functions that only I would read, I had to start writing as if someone else’s work depended on mine — because it did.

Anway, most of our integration is done, and now the software interns can run my electronics box without me being there at all! Did they somehow manage to completely drain our battery in a day? And fry the Arduino too? Yes. But hey, that's testing! And feedback for me to update the warnings in my documentation guide...

Another first: this was my first time working with a senior electrical engineer. I expected detailed feedback on my circuit design or new ways to optimize layouts. But what he taught me was just as valuable—he introduced me to the standards of the field. With our lab now outsourcing to a U.S.-based PCB fabrication company, I had to step up my documentation game. He walked me through best practices for silkscreen labeling, draftsman drawings, and the kind of clean documentation expected in industry.

He wasn’t around every day—he had his own project to run—and I often had to troubleshoot independently. At one point, I was tasked with finishing and debugging an EMG system he’d started. It was a critical component for our MVP (minimum viable product), and it wasn’t working. After some long experiments and a few key design changes, I got it functional. That moment reminded me that mentorship doesn’t always look like hands-on guidance. Sometimes, it’s the foundation someone gives you that allows you to go further on your own.

...and it really helps when you're passionate about the science you're communicating!

I've never really been into the research scene. So when my mentor suggested I apply for the AAAS poster competition, I was a bit hesistant. Me, who didn't want to touch academia with a ten-foot pole, in a national research competition? 

However, I had a lot of support. My mentor assured me our lab had a good track record with this competition and he had high hopes of this having a positive impact on my future. I was taking SEC 10, a scientific communcation class that gave me the confidence to speak about anything convoluted in digestable terms. Professor Gold, who taught SEC 10, helped me fine-tune my presentation and encouraged me to take pride in my work. Most of all, this was the first research project that's felt really meaningful to me personally and I was excited to talk about it.

When I got to the competition, I was competing against students with projects they had been working on for years, and presenting to a panel of judges who didn't know a wink about engineering. Yet, I won. Just goes to show you don't need eons of experience or life-changing innovation to tell people you're doing exciting work.

Ok, they're not *just* hangouts. I networked a bit. Looked at some very cool posters that did similar work to my lab's. Went to some talks, observed researchers get into heated discussions over methods...

...but come on, they were serving drinks at the poster expo! And livestreaming the Super Bowl too!

"Aren't conferences supposed to be intellectual meetings between stuffy academics?" I asked my mentor.

"They're really just hangouts for nerds," he said.

I also hung out with my fellow nerds (coworkers)! I got to learn their life stories and how they joined the company and even got big-sister-esque advice from my co-workers who shared a hotel room with me. 

Conferences are cool, and they're not as scary and serious as I thought they would be. Very glad my first one was with this lab!