I started my Masters in August of 2003 after taking a year off from school. During that year I looked for a job and traveled around Europe. While I had fun traveling, I did not have fun looking for a job and did not have much luck either. So, when I got the call from an old professor to come back and get paid to do research I said yes.

The money I was getting was coming from NASA, which added a “cool” factor to it as well. I was working on a project to add a natural language interface to the space shuttle problem reports to allow quicker and easier gathering of information by engineers. It was a good project and lot of fun to work on. Besides learning more about natural language processing and information retrieval, I also learned Perl. Perl has since become my preferred language when dealing with NLP problems.

I worked on that project for a year, before I decided that I was not real happy at UCF and would want to move on. I ended up getting a job in the Office of Research as a software engineer working on web applications for research/grant support. It was a good atmosphere to work in and let me learn more about dealing with non-technical customers and how to handle situations of conflicting desires from different bosses.

Because of the graduate classes I took as an undergraduate I was able to graduate with my Masters in December of 2004 (1 1/2 years after I started). I tried to take as many classes dealing with artificial intelligence/machine learning as possible, but there were not so many offered at UCF. Some of the classes I took were a waste of time and some of them netted me some new friends that I still have today. All in all it was not a bad education, but after spending my undergraduate and Masters there, I knew that I could get my Ph.D. there.

I did want to get my Ph.D., but not from UCF. I started looking around at other universities to try and find a fit. I was hoping to do research on information retrieval or natural language processing and really wanted to work with Japanese as well. I could not find anything inside the U.S. where I thought I would have the language help if I needed it. I started looking to Japan and reaching out to professors there and that is how I ended up at the University of Tokushima.