Mike Oren.com

All of my graduation pictures that are currently in my possession have finally been posted in my photo gallery. I'm still waiting to obtain copies of the photos my older brother took but until then, these are all the pictures I have.

In other news, I have finished my work at LexisNexis Interface Software and have moved down to Ames, Iowa to begin my work as a research assistant and graduate student at Iowa State University in the HCI program. I arrived here Monday, took care of some paper work, unpacked, did some shopping, went to sleep, and then woke up the next morning for my first day of work. In other words, I ended up with no break and hit the ground running. Although I've been fairly busy and haven't really had time to get fully settled and situated, so far I'm enjoying it down here and I'm excited about the work and the classes. I actually just registered for my fall courses today and I'm signed up for an advanced graphics course, a psychology course related to HCI, an HCI weekly seminar, and two course credits of research.

Speaking of research, the professor I'm working with is leaving for a conference in Europe at the end of the week, so my assignment for the next two weeks is to actually work on improving my computer science senior project (Moosic) for the purpose of conducting further user studies and possibly culminating in a research paper assuming we can place a proper academic spin on the topic. If we go forward with this, we hope to work with Terri Bonebright from DePauw University (where I just finished my undergraduate work) and hopefully work with the Iowa Braille School for the purpose of user studies. Needless to say, I am very excited about this and will post updates as they become available.