Catherine Larson

Background

About Catherine Larson

Hello! I'm Catherine, a physics major on the computational science track at Texas A&M University! I'm interested in all things math, physics, and computer science, and am pursuing software development as a career. I also enjoy music, baking, cooking, and nature. I chose physics as my major because I absolutely love learning new things, and physics allows me to learn new things about nature every day! I chose the computational science track because software development is exciting to me, and I get to learn the technicals of it along with learning all about physics. I've found that these two parts of my major end up helping each other: the problem solving abilities I've honed through my physics study have helped me in developing software, and the technical skills I've picked up from computer science allow me to think about physics problems and the natural world in a new and exciting way. I've had two major experiences with computer science: the 2022 Student Cluster Competition, and my 2023 Summer Internship at Dialexa, a digital product consulting company currently owned by IBM. The 2022 SCC was a competition centered around High Performance Research Computing (HPRC). Teams would design Parallel Computing systems, run benchmarks on carefully-selected configurations, and set up and run three applications on these systems. In 2022, these applications were LAMMPS, a molecular dynamics simulation, PHASTA, a fluid dynamics simulation, and SeisSol, the third "mystery" application that simulated earthquakes. My team prepared for this competition from the summer of 2022 to November of 2022, practicing different cluster setups and benchmark configurations and learning about, setting up, and doing practice runs of the applications. It was here that I developed by documentation-reading and command line skills, and had a peek into the world of HPRC as well. The internship is where my technical skills in web development were fully developed. I came in with limited knowledge about web apps, HTTP protocol, and APIs, and left having built a full intern project with my team using Typescript with ReactJS and ExpressJS in addition to contributing to a large-scale client project in the realm of finance that used.NET with C# and React. I also learned about SCRUM and Agile methodologies through these teams, and the best protocols for team communication, both inter-team and intra-team. On the intern project, I developed my documentation-reading skills even more, helping to integrate several outside APIs into out project.