Notes for your letter

What your letter covers that the others cannot

Hyo Kang is writing about the research we have published together. Tim DiFato is writing about my teaching and what I have contributed to the Digital Worlds Institute. Three things are yours.

• Work I led myself

  Most of my papers come out of Hyo's group, so a committee will ask whether I can lead a project of my own. MoodMentor was my studio's project, and you saw me run it from the first design through testing, fixes and expansion.

• The standards of your field

  You taught me accessibility and community-driven practice with autistic people. A committee in another discipline cannot judge whether I learned it or whether the work meets the standard you would expect of a doctoral student. You can.

• How I work with people

  You have seen me with clients, clinical staff, participants, students in the cohorts, and partners inside and outside the university. You have also seen how I take direction from a mentor, which is what an advisor most wants to know.

The record, as you saw it

• 2023 – 2024 We met in October 2023, while you were working with researchers and social workers in Massachusetts. You recommended my studio, Augmented Info Systems, to Road to Responsibility and South Shore Support Services. That became MoodMentor: VR vocational and emotional skill-building tools for autistic adults, deployed across the two networks. I led the project through my studio, which held the contract. We worked on it closely over a long period: designing the programs and the art, working with the clients, fixing problems as they came up, and running the testing. The networks then asked for more, which led to a new suite of tools focused on social interaction. I presented the design lessons as a peer-reviewed tutorial at IEEE GEM 2024 in Turin (“MoodMentor: Virtual Reality UI/UX Design Considerations for Neurodivergent Users”).
• Throughout You mentored me on accessibility and on community-driven approaches to working with autistic people. You introduced me to Dr. Ann-Marie Orlando at UF's Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, where I learned more about using VR with autistic students. We also worked together on the Florida Museum demo day project.
• 2024 – now PATHS (NSF Award 2346819), preparing autistic adults for quality assurance engineering work in semiconductors. You are a co-PI. I have been part of it since it was conceived. I built the VR training software for the program, and we launched it to the public together with Hyo Kang, with the first cohort in summer 2026. I have worked directly with the cohorts, helping participants learn to use the tools.

Where your judgment counts most

• A comparison. Where I stand among the doctoral students and researchers you have worked with in this area. Stanford's form asks for this directly, as a rating against a group you name.
• Whether the work is good by your field's lights: whether the tools were built with the people who use them, and whether I changed them when clients and staff said something was not working.
• Independence. What I did on MoodMentor without being told, and what I needed you for.
• One or two moments you remember without being reminded: a session with clients, a testing day, the PATHS launch.

One possible shape

1. How you know me, for how long, and in what capacity.
2. MoodMentor: what I did, how I worked with the networks and their clients, and what came of it.
3. PATHS: my part in it, and what you have seen of me with participants.
4. Your comparison, and your view on whether I am ready for doctoral research.

One letter works for all eight programs. Please put it on letterhead, sign it, and save it as a PDF, since two of the schools require that.