ECCV 2016 Daily - Thursday

ECCV Daily: What is your current position, Amy? Amy: Right now I’m just starting my Master’s in Computer Science at Stanford University. It’s a combined program with a Bachelor’s so you end up graduating in just one year after doing your Master’s. I finished up my Bachelor’s last June, and I’ll hopefully have a Master’s at the end of this year. ECCV Daily: Why did you choose a career in science? Amy: I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to continue going into research. I’m trying to decide at this point, whether or not I’m going to end up doing a PhD. I have always been, at least for much of my Bachelor’s, very interested in research. It’s a passion of mine, and I hope to be able to remain in it in whatever career path that I choose. I ended up stumbling into research when I met Olga Russakovsky two years ago at the end of my junior year in college. She happened to be working on a project, and I also knew Fei-Fei Li through class. Luckily, I got to end up working with both of them. ECCV Daily: Before your Bachelor’s, did you plan on going in a scientific direction? Amy: Yes, absolutely. At my high school, there were no computer science classes offered so my first CS class was day 1 of Stanford as a freshman. In high school, I took a more liberal arts track. I did IB Diploma which is kind of an international version of AP in America. It’s like the honors or advanced track in school, but it’s more liberal arts focused so it’s a lot of English classes, history, and language. It’s more classical studies. ECCV Daily: Is it for more gifted students or is it open for everyone? Amy: It’s open for everyone, but in my grade only 20 or 30 students out of a class of about 500 ended up doing it. It weeds you out as you go through the program. When I entered college, I decided to focus more on engineering, but I’ve always been really grateful for the IB program. Since I haven’t had such Amy Bearman 16 ECCV Daily: Thursday Women in Computer Vision