Jeffrey DeCew
Jeffrey is an Engineering major in the class of 2008 at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Jeff has done lots of work in robotics during his time at Olin, but is particularly interested in software problems.
If you are interested, Jeffrey's resume is available for downloading.
How I Got Started - A note to Olin students about your OSS
I got started on this project because I was playing lots of video games. I love video games, and when Team Fortress 2 and The Orange Box came out, I was immediately hooked. Once I had played through the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 director's commentary, I realized they did so much cool rendering detail that I would love to learn about.
So I spent a few hours looking at a few SIGGRAPH presentations about Valve's Source engine, the Valve Developer wiki, and eventually it boiled down to the simpler content I found on Wikipedia. It was at this point that I realized that I was hooked. Within a few days I had drafted an OSS proposal form for the next semester.
Then, 4 weeks into the next semester, and far into the work on my project, I still hadn't turned in that form... Oops. I got a lot of crap from StAR for that little fiasco.
The moral of ths story is that you should find a project you want to work on and make it your OSS, instead of choosing a satisfactory project to be your OSS when you're 2 weeks into the semester. OSS starts when you want it to, and any reasonable professor will let you take your own independant work and count it toward your requirement.