Scholar X Mentee Experience -2

First of all, let me give you a brief introduction about the Scholar X mentoring program. Scholar X is a 6-month free premium mentoring program specifically designed for the Sri Lankan university student community. My mentor for this session is Dr Charith Peris, who is currently employed as a research scientist at Amazon Alexa. He graduated from the University of Colombo and completed his PhD at Northeastern University, USA while holding a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

In recent sessions, we mainly focused on how to improve my CV. We also focused on potential career paths that I can take, mainly in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. Dr Charith introduced me to a professor at MIT, Dr Steffanie Muller, with whom we had a fruitful discussion about research opportunities in the field of HCI. She gave us a great description of the full extent of the HCI field can take. She also gave us a brief introduction to a few research topics that her lab was involved in, which were very informative and interesting. In addition to the meeting with Dr Steffanie, we also had an interesting discussion about current and future technological trends. Dr Charith also gave me some pointers on how to improve some of the research projects that I am currently working on.

The knowledge I got from our discussion in these meetings helped me realize certain things that I haven’t thought of earlier. Before I finish I would like to thank the Sustainable Education Foundation for allowing me to gain this invaluable experience.