Carissa Patton

Author: Carissa Patton | Major: Computer Engineering | Semester: Fall 2022

My name is Carissa Patton, and I just finished the first semester of my senior year as a Computer Engineering major in the College of Engineering. I started my Honors research with Dr. Alexander Nelson from the CSCE Department as my mentor, with whom I worked last semester and who is also my academic advisor. I will graduate in May of 2023 and intend to pursue an industry position or law school with an emphasis on intellectual property, specifically patents, which will allow me to utilize my engineering knowledge in a field where law and science intersect.

During my first semester of funding, I researched capacitive sensors to create a smart tool belt. After interning at a company over the summer and finalizing my decision to pursue an industry job or law school rather than an advanced degree in computer engineering, I shifted projects to work on a mobile application that would help students, faculty, and staff post and find research opportunities. Working on this will give me experience with a new framework, helping to expand my knowledge base which will be beneficial as I pursue my plans in the legal realm or industry.

The application I am working on will be available internally for University of Arkansas faculty, staff, and students. Research or other open positions can be posted by faculty or staff so that students can easily find and view these jobs. Students can search open positions with filters or by typing into a search bar that would look for matches among professors, job titles, job descriptions, and more, or students could explore by department and view information and open positions for each faculty/staff member.

This application will aid students greatly when it comes to finding research opportunities, as well as allow faculty/staff to easily post, edit, or delete positions they show to students. Having a single place to display all of the internal jobs will also help encourage cross-departmental research, which has the potential to produce better resulting projects utilizing skills across various departments.

I personally have done research in both the Chemical Engineering department and the Computer Engineering department but having an application like this would have made it easier to find those professors and positions. Pursuing this project allows me to aid other students in finding research so they can have similar experiences to my own, which was a key reason I chose to pursue this project.

Working on this has taught me to take initiative in deciding what features I want to implement while also seeing that projects like this come to life and are enhanced by interacting with a broad variety of people and departments. I have learned how many people are necessary to successfully create an app that can be used across campus, and my mentor has been crucial in helping foster communication between everyone required.

On this same note, challenges arose related to waiting periods when trying to obtain permissions or information for certain features. Again, my mentor was critical in facilitating communication and in providing ideas for making the most of wait times by working on alternate sections of the application.

In the future, I plan to work on this project for my honors thesis, which I will defend before graduation in May 2023. Some future work will include expanding this project to be used for Capstone/Senior Design courses so students can view all the potential projects, and professors can easily see interest levels and match students accordingly. This and additional features will be completed in the Spring and the application is to be rolled out for use by faculty and students within the coming year.