In Their Words: Yasmin Chowdhury

Name: Yasmin Chowdhury

College: College Ten

Department: Psychology

What Award/Scholarship did you receive? I received the Barron's Fellowship award this past Summer of 2018

What year do you expect to graduate? I expect to graduate in Spring of 2021.

Where do you call home? I am originally from Los Angeles, California. Within Los Angeles, I am from the San Fernando Valley, specifically from the city of Reseda.

With all of the choices for college, what made UC Santa Cruz stand out? I chose to come to UC Santa Cruz because their psychology department has a strong social justice oriented program. I feel like research is meaningless if we cannot use it to help others on some level, even if it is just on smaller scale.

What is your field of focus? My field of focus is in cognitive psychology. I specifically study spontaneous communication.

What do you hope to do once you graduate from UC Santa Cruz? I hope to either work in academia as a professor because I enjoy teaching and working with students or become a User Experience Researcher for a tech company, such as Google.

What is one memorable moment that stands out for you as a student here? I taught research methods for five quarters in a row and at the end of one of the quarters, all of my students wrote me really nice messages about how I was a great teacher. I was always unsure about my teaching abilities but it really validated my teaching skills.

What is your one piece of advice for incoming students about life at UC Santa Cruz? I would tell them to reach out and collaborate across other departments or labs instead of being in competition with other students. I've seen other universities that promote this kind of behavior in academia but it does not help anyone to hoard ideas. There are a lot of very talented researchers here and we can learn a lot of each other. From my own experience, this has been really positive to my skillset as a researcher.

How will this scholarship impact your academic life/research? This scholarship helped me code for my master's thesis in under a summer instead of having to take on extra work for income. My project focused on interactions with telepresence robots and face-to-face communication, where I observed which type of interaction led to participants being more creative.