Tabitha Peck

BS in Computer Science

Why did you choose Bucknell?

Bucknell has it all. Great academics, a beautiful campus, small classes, professors who know your name, nice dorms, and wonderful people.

What have you been doing since you graduated from Bucknell?

I am a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill working in Immersive Virtual Reality. 

Advice for incoming students

Your professors are valuable resources for your classes and for your life. Befriend your professors; they are some of the most interesting and wonderful people you will ever know.

Undergraduate research experiences

As an undergraduate I participated in the Computer Research Association Distributed Mentor Project (CRA-DMP), a program designed to "increase the number of women entering graduate studies in the fields of computer science and engineering" (www.cra.org) during the summers of 2003 and 2004. I spent my first summer as an undergraduate researcher at the University of Minnesota working with Professor Victoria Interrante. I created a Virtual Reality drawing method that duplicated a ribbon appearance by displaying lines as connected trapezoids using Catmull Rom splines.

I spent the summer of 2004 at Carnegie Mellon University working with Professor Jessica Hodgins. I independently created Biped.so, a program designed to accurately simulate and animate robot legs based on user defined initial physical parameters. A user interface was provided to manipulate initial parameters including joint angles and body masses. I used Maya for the working environment and MEL (Maya Embedded Language) to create the user interface.  The code for the physical calculations was provided by SD/FAST, a program for calculating physically-based equations.