Every so often, we highlight the importance of student scholarships by introducing you to the very students they help to succeed. Today, we’re speaking with Polly Muangrat, information systems and English literature, who recently received the Aol Advertising.com Scholarship.

Name: Polly Muangrat ’14
Major(s): Information Systems B.S. and English Literature B.A.
Scholarship(s): NSF SFS CyberCorps Scholar, Aol Advertising.com Scholarship, COEIT Vijay Jose Scholarship, Alumni Association Award

Polly Muangrat with Charles Butler, VP of Technical Operations

Q: Why did you decide to attend UMBC?

I wanted to attend UMBC most of all because of the environment and the programs offered. By environment, I mean that when I visited, the first thing I saw was the staggeringly enormous Humans v. Zombies team thundering across Erickson Field. And I loved that. Just walking around the Commons, I saw so many different groups of people, different ethnicities and languages being spoken. I knew UMBC would be a school where you could be yourself and do the things that made you happy, which transcends across to the freedom in educational pursuits here as well. I get surprised looks during interviews when recruiters see that I’m both in STEM and Humanities, which is made possible by UMBC’s truly inspiring and challenging English courses and IS courses.

Q:  What has been the most amazing discovery you’ve made so far as a student here?

The amount of resources UMBC offers its students, especially in terms of post-graduate career seeking, internships and research opportunities. Different departments offer a lot of help, like Career Services, or the Office of Institutional Advancement. As a first generation college student, I never really knew how the corporate world worked, except for what I saw in “The Office.” My parents are not part of the corporate world, so my first internship was an invaluable experience to me. I find myself thinking about all of the career fairs and UMBCworks posts that I should be taking advantage of, and remind myself that without these resources, I would be desperately combing Craigslist or Monster.

Q:  Tell us about a class or club that has really opened your mind (and why)…

I have a great admiration for usability, interface design and the general field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), all topics covered in my IS 303 and 403 classes, taught by Dr. Ravi Kuber and Dr. Shaun Kane, respectively. I think a lot of developers and programmers forget a certain human factor in the designs of everyday hardware or software, which can lead to wasted time and unfortunate future consequences. This missing step fascinates me, and these two classes really helped me see the glaring problems in technology design, and challenged me to create solutions.

Pretty much any English Literature course I take inspires me, and really reminds me how to think and communicate. There is a way that novels can access all of the human thought process that textbooks cannot.

Q:  What do you hope to do after graduation, and why?

After graduation, I hope to obtain a position within the US Department of Defense, which is a part of my scholarship requirement. I would really love to understand more of the crucial vulnerabilities in national information security, and to be a part of generating working, long-term solutions and defenses. It will also be a great starting point for me, first to help decide whether I prefer the private or public sector.

Q:  How important is it to you as a student to get scholarship support?

Scholarship support is the reason that I can hope to receive higher education, both financially and mentally. Mentally, a scholarship acts to me as a commendation of my academic and personal achievements. Receiving an award is the support and figurative “high five” that keeps me going; it assures me that I am on the right path, that I am doing the right things. I’ll remember this feeling of gratitude and pride, and hopefully be able to give another future student, somewhere, the same feeling.

Q:  What would you say to the people at the company who provided your scholarship?

I would just like to say, first, a very warm thank you. Thank you for giving me the ability to pursue my educational goals, and for investing interest and support in me. Just knowing that hard work will pay off, and has paid off, is instrumental in motivating me forward to work harder, accomplish more achievements and set strong, reachable goals.

If Angel funded Mainframe2 has their way with the cloud, what they reveal this week at Demo Fall 2013, will make Adobe’s Creative Cloud feel more like a light mist, whilst simultaneously driving the final nail into the coffin of desktop computing.

What Mainframe2 is attempting is to empower users of the multi-billion dollar software industry to run thousands of non-web Windows and Linux applications, in any browser that supports HTML5, via the cloud.

Imagine using Photoshop on your cell phone during your morning commute!

Don’t like the upfront cost of purchasing Adobe CS6, or the idea of paying the subscription for CC? Mainframe2’s rental model will allow you to dip in and out as you need at a cost that reflects your actual usage.

And because all of this is maintained in that mysterious cumulonimbus cloud high the sky, you’ll always be working with the latest releases.

Unlike already established virtualization and cloud computing providers such as VMware and Citrix, Mainframe2 claims to be able to scale power to the nth extreme by using as many CPU’s and GPU’s as your job requires. Think of it as engineering workspaces (plural) in the cloud. Because Mainframe2 supports nVIDIA’s virtual GPU standard, graphical intensive programs will not only be doable, but will be the primary targets for their Autumn release.

Granted, their vision is of the grandest nature, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t supremely confident in their ability to pull it off — their founder and CEO is Nikola Bozinovic, as Chief Technologist for MotionDPS, his work with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory enabled pilots to fly unmanned drones on different continents in real time over a multi-link satellite connection; for some reason, letting me edit an Illustrator file on my tablet by running it from a data center and converting frames to H.264 video doesn’t seem to carry quite the same air of complexity.

The technology and the brains behind it are there. But, what remains to be seen is whether the industry giants play nicely with Mainframe2. History suggests that isn’t likely. Remember when OnLive revolutionized the entire gaming industry? Yeah, you don’t, because months after Microsoft determined OnLive was in violation of Microsoft licensing terms they filed for bankruptcy, or as they later categorized it, “restructured.”

If Mainframe2 manages to avoid the hurdles, this could be the biggest shakeup in software licensing we’ve ever seen.

Will Mainframe2 revolutionize software licensing? Would you be happy licensing software by usage? Let us know in the comments.

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