Radicubs Robotics interviewed Assistant Professor Jessica Ouyang from the University of Texas at Dallas, where we asked her questions about the major she teaches and her experience in Computer Science. Below are the questions that we asked her in our interview!

Could you tell me a little about yourself, like what you do at your university?

I'm an assistant professor of computer science and that means I'm a research faculty and so I teach courses with about a third of my time, and then the rest of the time I spend doing either service for the department, it's the other third, and then the last third is research. So my research is in natural language processing, which is the branch of AI that's dedicated to processing text.

What advice would you give to young women trying to pursue computer science and like the other related majors and stuff?

I would say that you will probably not see many other women in your classes compared to gentlemen and that's fine. Not fine that there are few, but fine for you. Don't be discouraged. Don't be intimidated, you can be just as passionate and just as good and better than some of the boys at this. Even if you find yourself as the only girl in your higher-level courses, then that just means that you are smarter and more dedicated to it.

The other I would say is that This is not specific to computer science, but just in general, you can get the same college education pretty much anywhere you go. The courses are going to be very similar. The degree is similar. The difference is going to be the people that you meet and the connections that you make. In Computer Science, as in any field, the people that you know will help you a lot and will help you go a long way. Who do you know? What faculty are willing to write letters of recommendation for you? What extracurricular activities were you involved in? What kind of industry contacts did you make through them? So don't don't neglect the the networking or the people side and just sort of stick to your books, but also make those connections because it can help you a lot later when you're looking for a job.

What drew you to computer science and natural language processing?

I took computer science in high school as well. I enjoyed it. I did not intend to do my career about it, I was pre-med. But then this is why I say the people you know make a big difference. When I was an undergrad, my major advisor was an NLP researcher and he encouraged me to do a lot of research internships and to take courses that were related to the topic. He took me under his wing and it just kind of went from there that once I had been introduced to the topic, I enjoyed it.

I didn't know at the time, how do you pick your internships? How do you set yourself up for your future career? But that's what he knew about. He pushed me to do the quote-unquote right internships and take the opportunities that would set me up to go to grad school and eventually get an academic career. So I always like to say it was kind of by accident. If I hadn't been assigned to that particular advisor, I probably would have just gone to medical school and not gotten into computer science. But I don't know. For me, it was luck.

Could you give us a day in your life of just what you do at your job?

So I teach one course a semester, this semester I'm doing discrete math two at UT Dallas. In the fall semesters, I usually teach the graduate NLP course and then in the spring semesters, I usually do discrete one or discrete two. So, I have my course and then I'll do that for an hour and 15 minutes. And then afterward, I'll note down attendance and see if anyone has questions, then write down what I want to say at the next lecture to answer all those questions. Usually, I'll go into a meeting with one of my PhD students and we'll talk about what their research project is going through right now.

I have one hour per week with each of my PhD students. They give me an update on what’s done the last week, what progress is made, what are the things that they’re not sure about how to proceed, or any problems encountered. We'll sort of work through those together and make a plan for what they're going to do for the next week, depending on, exactly what's going on. Sometimes it's the research project, sometimes it's the project that is mostly done. We're writing a paper to publish about it, so there might be a lot more proofreading, editing, and discussing how are we going to frame what we're trying to say about whatever it is that we discovered.

I'll have two or three of those on any given day, depending on the day. Then, we have to do departmental service. I'm on the Graduate School Admissions Committee, so we'll go and look at the Ph.D. applications and chase down whatever faculty member a particular applicant wants to work with. If it's an NLP applicant, for me, I'll just go ahead and evaluate the application and decide the pros and cons of this particular candidate then there is faculty hiring that usually happens in the spring. Then there's usually going to be a one-hour or so talk from a recent Ph.D. graduate from another university who's hoping to start working as a professor at UT Dallas.

We'll go to that and then give feedback for the search committee to decide, what does everyone think about this candidate? Then the rest of the time, which there's unfortunately not very much anymore, I'll usually spend working on my own projects in the research space. So as a faculty member, my job is to sort of manage the lab-level goals. So I'll have individual PhD students who are working on small projects. My job is to think about what is the bigger picture, what are all of us working towards? How do all these projects fit together? What are our overall goals? And then apply for funding from something like the National Science Foundation to propose.

And then for my last question, do you have any extracurriculars that you did in high school that you think built your skill set, whether that be in leadership, computer science, or anything like that?

My extracurriculars in high school were not geared towards a computer science career because at the time I didn't think I was going into it. I was an EMT and then I was also in police explorers. Those are not particularly relevant to computer science necessarily, but I do think that developing leadership skills is important. If you're going to work in computer science, a lot of times you're working with a team, or at some point as you move up in your career, you'll be managing a team. Knowing how to navigate those kinds of interpersonal relationships and delegate tasks to motivate your team members is important.

I would also say this is not something from high school, but something I sort of discovered later in grad school. You might not feel it now because you're in high school, but as you get older, your body starts to not like the fact that you sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day so much anymore. I do think that having a sport that you enjoy is pretty important. It's great to de-stress and it also will sort of combat the negative health effects of our very sedentary job.