Month: April 2012

How to Survive Your Capstone in 10 Easy (HA!) Steps

April 27, 2012April 27, 2012 | by steph | 1 Comment

Here’s a quick thesis/capstone survival guide I put together for a talk at Penn last fall. It’s close to graduation time so hopefully it will come in handy to someone!

1. Capstones scare everybody.Â Face it together.

You might think you are the worst procrastinator in the world, that no one has ever been as scared of a stupid paper, and that everybody else is doing way better.

Nope!

Everybody suffers when they’re working on the magnum opus of their education thus far, the document that could propel them to greatness or banish them to mediocrity FOREVER.Â It helps to have a cadre of friends or colleagues for venting, study dates, and plain old empathy.Â You often get tips and insights when you talk through whatever you’re stuck on, that you wouldn’t get plugging away on your own.Â So even if it seems like some of your classmates have … Read the rest

Uncategorized

Be Your Own Puppet: Miwa Matreyek’s stunning video shadow puppetry

April 27, 2012April 27, 2012 | by steph | Leave a Comment

In mid-March I went to Baltimore’s Quest Fest to see a performance by Miwa Matreyek, an animator who I hadn’t heard of even a couple of months ago. I stumbled across her work on some internet afternoon stroll and was captivated by the clips that I saw.Â Lucky for me, other people from the Pricess Grace Foundation to TED had heard of her.

Her work is heavily inspired by shadow puppetry, and in fact when I first looked at her work my mind immediately went to this exquisite video for the Little Dragon song “Twice” by Johannes Nyholm.

But in her work, she is the puppet. She performed two pieces at Quest Fest, “Dreaming of Lucid Living”, and “Myth and Infrastructure”. In each, she projects an original animation on a screen, but uses a second projector in back of the screen to throw the shadow of her figure into … Read the rest

Gender and tech, Uncategorized

Hacking the Gender Gap at the Women In Tech Summit

April 20, 2012January 29, 2013 | by steph | Leave a Comment

Tomorrow, The Hacktory is excited to present a workshop at the Women In Tech Summit called Hacking the Gender Gap: A Hands-On Workshop for Boosting Gender Diversity in Tech. Georgia, Sarah, and Steph will facilitate activities to pull from people’s positive and negative experiences in tech as well as some of the research on the gender gap in STEM. We’ll work through strategies for combating sexist behavior and building a more diverse tech community. We hope to use this workshop as a first step in gathering data and stories that women, girls, and their allies can use in their organizations.

Check back here for a resource list and some of the outcomes from the session. And if you haven’t signed up for the summit they may still be taking some last minute registrations!

Happy Tech Week, everyone!… Read the rest