John A. Pershing III ’10
Which faculty member influenced you the most?
I worked for Dr. Michael Scott as a Research Assistant from the tail end of my sophomore year until I started working with 1010data (my first employer out of UR). Dr. Scott and my experiences working in his lab taught me a lot about professionalism, academia, and life more generally. He was an inspiring educator and showed me how interesting the bleeding edge of the Computer Science discipline could be.
How do you describe the University of Rochester to someone who’s never visited?
The University of Rochester is an institution that operates at the scale of a large research university, but has a student body of a mid-sized liberal arts college. It offers an incredibly flexible curriculum brought to you by world-class academics. Your experience there sits at the nexus of education, engineering, medicine, and music.
What’s your most memorable Rochester hangout?
I declared my Computer Science major in my Sophomore year, which granted me access to the URCS Majors Lab. I never felt compelled to join Greek life/similar because the URCS community was my extended family at Rochester. The Majors Lab was where we studied and worked on projects, it was where we hung out and socialized, and a nontrivial fraction of the time it was where I slept. The lab has moved since I graduated, but I'll always have a special place in my heart for that room on the sixth floor of the Computer Studies Building.
What advice would you give an incoming student?
It took me several years to get over the stigma that asking for help was a sign of weakness. A fantastic advantage of UR is that it's a smaller school, and the professors have the time, attention, and passion for teaching that gives you the opportunity to form a real connection with them. In support of this, you should go to your professors' office hours as often as your schedule allows. Even if you do not need help with a specific problem set/project/etc, visiting them helps build a relationship that will help you out in your academic journey in the future.