For sixth year Ph.D. candidate Mike Lam, UMD's computer science department is the ideal institution for cross-area research collaboration and teaching experience. Mike started off focusing on a Programming Languages concentration but soon transitioned to High Performance Computing. "Computer science is more than just programming," Mike says. "In my undergraduate upper level electives I studied algorithms and languages, and it's that meat of higher level concepts that I find most interesting and what led me to graduate school." His current project hones in on programming analysis and he is collaborating with his adviser, Professor Jeff Hollingsworth, on research with the University of Wisconsin. Mike chose to work toward his graduate degree at UMD because of the program's breadth. "There are more faculty and areas of concentration here so it allowed me to have greater flexibility," Mike says. "I wasn't sure exactly which area I was most interested in so being able to have a lot of choices was very appealing to me." The department's omission of first year comprehensive exams was also a big draw. Calling them "arbitrary measurements of how much you learned", Mike reflects that the lack of "comps" allowed him to alleviate a lot of unneeded stress. When deciding what university to attend, this factor distinguished UMD from other schools that implement this testing. "Grad school is stressful in general but without the comps, I was able to focus on the good stress of succeeding in my coursework," Mike says. As an R1 (research one university), quality research is made a priority along with aiding students with the best resources to complement their studies. Mike regularly attends CIS chat, a networking reading group, and enjoys the broad availability of cross-area discussions. These meetings allow participants to engage in dialogue about advanced concepts outside of a student's immediate area of research. Mike has also taken advantage of the department's two year guarantee that incoming Ph.D. students can become either a Research Assistant or Teaching Assistant. In summer 2012, he taught CMSC 330 "Organization of Programming Languages", which affirmed his decision to become a professor. "Through teaching a course, I was able to interact with students and lead discussions; ultimately, this experience confirmed what I've been working toward to instruct at a collegiate level," Mike says. You can read more about Mike's research here: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~lam/