He dances, he climbs, he teaches Computer Science: Meet Max

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:11:17 -0500
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Meet Max, a Teaching Assistant who loves climbing mountains, swing dancing, and Artificial Intelligence.

“I’ve never been bored in my life,” says Maksym Morawski (call him Max), a Computer Science graduate student who spends most of his free time scaling mountains.

Originally from Silver Spring, Max moved to Baltimore in 2006 to study Computer Science as an undergraduate. In the 4th grade, while others kids were busy building volcanoes for their science projects, Max and his computer scientist dad were putting together a computer that compared different algorithms for computing prime numbers. So choosing his major in college, explains Max, was a no-brainer.

Now a second year graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Computer Science, Max is working on a thesis that looks at predicting connections in social networks, like Facebook. A computer scientist with a sociological streak, Max’s project uses computers to understand how people interact with one another based on e-mail data sets taken from corporations.

Max’s foray into teaching began in 2010 when he became a Teaching Assistant for CMSC 202. He says his favorite part about being a TA are the discussions—where he actually gets to get up and teach and get his students excited about Computer Science. His dose of teacherly advice is as follows: “Program for fun.” If you don’t practice and enjoy programming, he explains, you will never be as good as someone who lives and breathes it.

Throughout his years at UMBC, Max’s on-campus involvement has extended past teaching. An avid dancer (he frequents Mobtown Ballroom in Baltimore City), he founded UMBC’s Swing Dancing club. He also helped conceive Project X, the club that sponsored a campus-wide scavenger hunt in 2008 and 2009 that included tasks like jumping into the Inner Harbor and high-fiving Freeman Hrabowski (which prompted a not-so-enthusiastic e-mail from the UMBC president). The prize for the hunt was an amalgamation of candy that was procured from the “Spot” using late-night meals over a series of weeks, explains Max.

But, Max’s favorite thing to do is the hobby he took up in high school: exploring mountains. A frequenter of Earth Treks—a climbing center in Columbia–Max had plans to climb frozen waterfalls in New York State this winter. His dream job, he says half-jokingly, is to be a mountaineering guide. Though, he may also consider a job in academia: “I would love to be a teacher,” he says.