So much to share, so little time!

Let me start by saying 'whew'...it has been a long past 2 weeks (not that that's an excuse for months of missing blog entries). Time for some (brief) updates on my journey up to now...

First, I'm finally out of my 2 year paper drought! Well, sort of. No first author full papers BUT I did get to collaborate on 3 accepted FSE (Foundations of Software Engineering) papers. Two papers were for the NIER (New Ideas and Emerging Results) track: a paper related to my dissertation on tools tailored to the developer and a paper on improving qualitative studies using social sites, such as Hacker News.
One, which I was second author on, was a full paper on developer information needs when using security tools.


The most exciting part is that I've been working on getting an FSE paper in for years now...and finally it happens. AND the conference was in Italy, which made it even better! :) Yes, I got to visit Bergamo, Italy for one week and it was great. The food was great, the people were great...everything was just, great. I may post some pictures...just been so laazzzzyyy since I made it back :D.

As usual, I met my three new people (and then some); the cool thing about attending a conference after years in the PhD is that you start to run into people you recognize -- and they recognize you! After working at MSR for the summer, I encountered a number of people I both worked with and met through working at MSR. Will forever be grateful for that experience.

Speaking of MSR, sadly my internship ended 2 weeks ago. My last update spoke of it being 4 weeks in...before I knew it, I was in week 12 trying to finalize data collection and analysis prior to my departure. If you're curious, we did go for an ICSE submission (fingers crossed)! I'll be able to give more details once I find out if we made it in. Don't hold your breath though...won't find out for a few months now :/. So now we wait...but I would be remiss if I didn't note, again, how great my time was at MSR. Working with Tom Zimmermann and Chris Bird and getting to know the researchers and research at Microsoft was truly a unique and encouraging experience.

Ironically, my time at MSR further validated my desire to work in academia. Though I really enjoyed doing research at MSR, my time there helped me realize that in academia, I can have the best of both worlds! While there, I met a number of professors visiting to do research or just to see what kind of research is being done in industry. I could definitely see myself teaching during the year and then doing something different during the summer with the cool kids at MSR :)

I know I said I would be brief, but I feel like I have so much to share. Those are the major points though - things have been a whirlwind on top of the fact that I missed my boyfriend's birthday while in Italy so I'll need to make that up to him at some point. But I'm living life and trying to find balance...now I'm working toward my Oral (finally) so I can try to really get my life started.

Hopefully I can get better at these blog posts so I don't have to brain dump every time - but that's all for now. Until next time... :)