User:Hz48

About Me

My hometown is Brentwood, Tennessee, and I graduated from Brentwood High School. In my free time, I love to read (anything from classics like Jane Eyre to modern sci-fi/fantasy like Lord of the Rings), sketch or paint (my favorite subjects are people), watch/read anime/manga, or play badminton (though I'm definitely in need of practice!).

I'm an American-Born-Chinese, and I visit my grandparents in Beijing, China every other summer.

I'm currently a freshman at Duke University (Pratt) and I live in Brown Dorm.

Name Pronunciation

So, my first name-Helen-is basically a given. I haven't ever had someone mispronounce it (In case someone does, however, it's pronounced "HEH-len"). I have had some friends try to abbreviate it, though, but I think it's pretty obvious why that doesn't work. My last name, the way all Chinese people pronounce it, is like the name "John" without the "n" at the end. The IPA version of my name, Helen Zhang, is /ˈhələn dʒaŋ/.

Link to a Grand Challenge for Engineering

Fusion Power:Will It Ever Come?, William E. Parkins, Science Magazine, 10 March 2006, Accessed 12 September 2010 (Grand Challenge)

Favorite MATLAB Demonstration

In terms of comprehension, I liked the "basic matrix operations" demonstration the best. It reinforced what I learned in class and showed me different ways to plot a matrix, and the commands were simple and easy to follow. And since I've learned about matrices I knew what the demo was talking about when it said it was inverting or multiplying matrices, for example. For some of the other demos, the graphics were very impressive (like 3-D surface plots and Bending Truss) but I hadn't learned enough to be able to understand how they would be used in real-life applications or how to even read/analyze the results of demo, so I couldn't really follow it.