Short Story Feature with Volleyball Junior Sydney Bauer

Junior Sydney Bauer, a information systems major from Allen, Texas, answers a few questions about student life at Carnegie Mellon, talks about her internships, what she's excited for during spring semester, and what classes have impacted her time at CMU.

1. What do you enjoy about campus life?

I really enjoy the close proximity of everything on campus. It's nice to be a short distance from a free movie or food of some kind. My sister goes to Baylor down in Texas and that campus is huge so sometimes she drives to her classes across campus. It's just nice to be able to walk to everything because of the short distances between them. It really comes in handy when you're running late for something :).

2. What do you get involved in outside of volleyball?

Truthfully, I don't really do much outside of volleyball and school work. I did the 100 Plus Day of Service last semester and I hope to be able to participate in that again when it comes up. I mostly like to focus on my schoolwork or watch some Netflix. My friends always know I'm the go-to person to ask about many different shows and movies.

3. What are you excited about this spring semester?

This spring I am very excited to be working with a middle school in the Pittsburgh area for one of my classes. The school has a cool simulation activity that students go through to help them learn both life and classroom skills. My team has the opportunity to work with the simulator and the teachers to gather data and present it in a way so that teachers can show the students' improvements over each simulation, and later over their years at the school.

4. Why did you select your course of study – what class have you enjoyed the most?

I really love animation and was very interested in the technical side of it, which helped me choose Information Systems as a major while taking on Animation and Special Effects as a minor. I can't say that I have a single favorite class, but really all of my animation classes so far have been favorites because I am able to learn how to successfully model and animate different characters for different scenes. So far at CMU I've designed and animated my own personal character and I've animated other characters designed by other people into some cool scenes.

5. What class has been recommended by your teammates or friends as a MUST TAKE class at CMU? OR, what class would you recommend someone take?

I don't know if this is a 'must take', but I would really recommend people take 15-112. The class is difficult, I'd have to say, but it is very rewarding in the end. It really helped my understanding of how to think about different problems technically then transfer it into code. I really didn't feel the benefits on taking it until about halfway through the semester. I was able to understand more problems in my other classes because I now learned a different way of approaching and thinking about them. The class is done in a common coding language, Python, which makes learning other languages such as Javascript, Java, or even COBAL very easy, which helped me in later semesters when I took classes that involved those languages.

6. What have you enjoyed about Pittsburgh?

I am actually from Texas so really the thing I've enjoyed most about Pittsburgh would have to be the weather. Down in Texas we usually get just summer and then sort of a cold fall. Up here in Pittsburgh, there's actually spring, summer, fall, and then winter with lots of snow, which was very exciting to me my freshman year when it snowed more than half an inch. It's really nice also to see the trees change color in the fall and then have a nice blooming season in the spring. The trees here are gorgeous and so being able to watch them change to pretty yellows and reds and then see them bloom again later is wonderful.