Building Connection During Orientation

Students' introduction to the MSR program was as much about getting to know each other as it was about the technology they will use throughout the program.

It could be easy to think that all orientations are mostly the same. David Khachatryan (MSR '25), a first-quarter student in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Robotics (MSR) program, quickly realized that's not the case.

David Khachatryan
David Khachatryan
"The MSR orientation was very different from any other orientation process I have experienced," he said. "The two-week hackathon immersed us in all the technologies and opportunities Northwestern has to offer, as well as giving our cohort the chance to bond over our work. It threw us into hands-on projects and collaborative problem solving."

The MSR program welcomes students to campus with two weeks filled with introductions to faculty and resources, technical workshops, and, as Khachatryan mentioned, a hackathon. The goal of the orientation is twofold. It's important that students are prepared to use the various systems and technologies available to them, but it is just as important that they get to know more about each other.

Grayson Snyder
Grayson Snyder
That community aspect is what stood out about the experience to Grayson Snyder (MSR '25).

"Because we are all here with a shared passion and focus on robotics, we can connect in a high-energy setting despite having different backgrounds," he said. "I learned from my peers who had prior exposure to things new to me, and I was able to help them with things they had not seen, so we fostered a positive feedback loop."

That feedback loop was particularly helpful for the hackathon, where students were challenged to use computer vision to manipulate a robot. The hackathon was the first time Snyder integrated computer vision with a physical robot system. His project was to use a camera and image processing to have a small robot arm take a pen out of his hand.

Khachatryan used camera image processing to program a robot arm to detect and grab a purple pen.

"I had no idea that the technology to identify a distance down to the individual pixel was so accessible," he said. "This knowledge, and having the skills to program something like this, open up a lot of opportunities for independent and autonomous robots."

As Khachatryan worked on his project, he considered other opportunities to use robotics to support low-vision users. As an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he worked in a lab that focused on human-computer interaction techniques to build software for people with limited vision.

It's an area he hopes to pursue more during and after his time in the MSR program.

"Accessibility research was what brought me into robotics," he said. "There are so many possibilities for robots to help those with disabilities."

Like Snyder, Khachatryan realized his classmates will play a critical role in helping him on that journey. While he appreciated the technical lessons taught during orientation, the opportunity to collaborate with other students may have been the most important takeaway from the experience

"Solving challenging problems together with the cohort really fast-tracked our ability to learn from each other," he said. We got real experience using all the fancy lab equipment Northwestern provides for us, which will continue to be useful as we progress in the MSR program. We know that we can utilize not only technology, but also each other’s knowledge, to tackle the hardest problems."

Being able to learn from one another is a key part of the MSR experience, and it's made possible because of the cohort's small size and diverse makeup, MSR co-director Matthew Elwin said.

"Each year at the hackathon, I am always impressed with how quickly a small cohort of students with diverse technical backgrounds can go from being complete strangers to leaning on each other’s experience to successfully complete a series of intense robotics programming challenges," Elwin said.

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