Hello! My name is Matthew Kolosick. I’m a fourth year undergraduate at Northeastern University, and this year I was fortunate to be selected for the ECOOP summer school program with funding to attend the conference in Rome provided by the NSF. As an undergraduate planning to seek a PhD this is a particularly exciting opportunity, and my intention is to use the variety of talks, workshops, and programs that make up the conference to explore the broadness of research areas in the programming languages field. From ECOOP itself I hope to gain a better understanding for both the state of the art in research, but also for the breadth of topics that are being studied. The associated CurryOn conference is an excellent complement as it shows the interactions between the research and industrial communities.

The last thing that I am intending to get out of my attendance at ECOOP this summer is connections. Attending last year had me meeting Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi, a professor at Brown University. Through this connection I am now working as an intern on a research project with his group. This, I think, is the biggest opportunity offered by a large conference such as ECOOP, and one that I am happy to take advantage of.