2016 Year In Review
2016 hasn’t been the best year to the world. But between finishing the first year of my Ph.D., living in the Pacific Northwest this summer, and passing qualifying exams, I tried to make the most of the tumultuous year.
Since everyone else is doing it, below is my own 2016 Year in Review.
The Serious Stuff
May: After finishing my first year of graduate school, I made a tough decision to switch research groups. It was exactly what I needed.
PhD Year I: done.
— Fred Hohman (@fredhohman) May 6, 2016
Summer: I spent my summer in Washington state interning at Pacific Northwest National Lab working on interpretable deep learning research.
July: I celebrated one year of daily journaling and wrote about my writing process.
August: I took a trip to San Francisco to attend my advisor’s workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analytics at KDD 20161.
October: I then took another trip to Baltimore to attend IEEE VIS 20162.
past and present yellow jackets at #ieeevis #swarm 🐝🐝🐝 pic.twitter.com/bP7pJvCiaT
— GT Visualization (@GT_Vis) October 25, 2016
November: After taking my written qualifying exams in August, I passed my oral qualifying exams, marking the completion of the first major milestone of my Ph.D.!
I passed my Ph.D. qualifying exams! 🙌
— Fred Hohman (@fredhohman) November 17, 2016
The Not So Serious Stuff
May: I bought my second road bike in Washington. For being nearly 30 years old, it’s in mint condition.
May: I discovered the comedy advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me, and subsequently the whole fleet of McElroy shows. A sliver of happiness during this year.
July: During my internship I took a few trips to places like LA, Portland, and Seattle.
August: As I left the Pacific Northwest to head back to Atlanta, I snapped my favorite picture of the year.
December: For my Information Visualization class, my group-mates and I made A Viz of Ice and Fire, an interactive, narrative visualization summarizing the visual and textual aspects of the hit HBO series Game of Thrones.
What’s Next?
Just like last year, I’ll keep making the monthly playlists to find new music throughout the year. I’d also like to write some more technical blog posts too, most likely related to my graduate research.
But for now that’s all I have. Thanks for sticking around, and I’ll see you in 2017!
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From kdd.org: “The premier interdisciplinary conference, brings together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data.” ↩
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From ieeevis.org: “The premier forum for advances in visualization for academia, government, and industry. This week-long event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in visualization solutions.”” ↩